Preliminary reports make clear that drastic adjustments are bound to take shape across the seven colleges, with proposals ranging from merging academic departments to revising the academic calendar. But as daunting as some of these plans may seem, we hope the University seizes this opportunity to drastically overhaul fundamental academic requirements across the University to improve the effectiveness of the undergraduate education.

The University currently relegates the task of constructing graduation requirements to the individual undergraduate colleges. Each school thus has its own “breadth requirements,” which are meant to prompt students to take courses beyond their major. Expanding students’ horizons as well as allowing each college to set its own standards and goals is a good thing. Yet, overtime, these breadth requirements have fallen out of touch and have lead to an accumulation of waste, both of students’ time and the colleges’ resources.

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, for example, houses an extremely diverse array of academic programs from communication to animal science to landscape architecture. There is little that unifies the academic interests of students in CALS, yet the college has a fairly stringent distribution requirement that dictates about one-third of a student’s course load, before major requirements are even considered. What is the goal of these distribution requirements? What does CALS really want its students to learn?

These curricular mandates have lead to a demand from students for “easy A” courses that satisfy requirements. The University has answered this call with a saturation of courses that fall far below the standard of academic rigor that should be found here at Cornell. CALS students overload their schedules with courses such as BIOG 1009: Biology for Nonmajors, a course that was solely created to fulfill ineffective distribution requirements.

The same can be said for the College of Arts and Sciences, where students of the humanities often take courses such as Mathematics 1300: Mathematical Explorations. These courses, however, often traverse a mile wide and only an inch deep. Wouldn’t a student benefit more from exploring more challenging concepts found in fundamental, preexisting courses such as Calculus?

Over the years as Cornell’s colleges have modernized, their original distribution requirements grew out of touch with their primary goals. It is time that Cornell’s colleges reassess what it is they want their graduates to know and how to most efficiently and cost-effectively teach these concepts.

One small step in the right direction was exhibited in a draft of the College of Arts and Sciences’ task force report that proposes revising the college’s current requirement that all students take 34 courses to graduate. Whether it be by eliminating the requirement or by shrinking the number of courses, we support this notion to loosen course requirements in an effort to minimize the cost of extraneous course offerings. It will additionally prove beneficial down the road to specify its academic objectives and how the breadth requirements meet them.

The main objective of the budget cuts will be for Cornell to emerge a “leaner and stronger institution,” and we think a restructuring of distribution requirements is an appropriate place to start.