However, the challenge is to take exactly the right kinds of units and exactly the right amount of them. An even bigger challenge is trying to get into each of the required classes in just four years. Students may wind up taking as many as 140 units, still without being able to graduate. This brings their time at CSUN up to as many as six years, enough time to witness the reign of three university presidents. Graduating in less time could be made much easier if students were required to take those classes, oh, we don't know, say, related to their majors.
General education is what high school is for.
That is where we learn how to solve problems using equations, how to dissect a frog and how to write an essay in five-paragraph form. By the time we get to college, we should be narrowing our focus to studies directly related to our future careers. We, as journalism majors, would like to know when we will have to classify a species of shrubbery or know what an endoplasmic reticulum is and how it works. Unless, of course, we were to work for a scientific journal. That is what a minor or collateral field is for.