Our University System in the US -- Too Much GenEd?

[m_the0ry]

At my institution for a B.S. in Electrical Engineering my gen ed consists of

5 credits 'composition'
25 credits arts/humanities

This amounts to two quarters or about one semester of work. Roughly 1/6th of my overall degree. I took some very interesting humanities classes, like introduction to law, which I believe should be required. Too many people don't know their rights.

My only gripe with the gen ed was the 'composition' class. My degree requires classes in technical communication, which is writing research papers, specifications, and other scientific documents. On top of that it gives you skills to effectively present design plans and persuade management. These classes were incredibly valuable and are definitely not gen ed. 'Composition' on the other hand was your typical 'literature analysis' english class. Where you read poetry and pick out rhetoric and analyze it until there's nothing left to analyze. This class structure pisses me off to no end. Learning to write rhetoric and wade through its ambiguity such that you can tell an instructor exactly what they want to hear is certainly a skill but it is an absolutely worthless one. I don't know how the universities or even high schools get away with this garbage. The AP 'english' exam/metric is meaningless. There are definitely some wonderful modern writers out there who got 'english' degrees, but the factof the matter is you have a greater likelihood of being struck by lightening than helping society out in any way with your skills with rhetoric.