Why is Introduction to Psychology in every university a tedious survey of every aspect of psychology that no student likes and that no student can avoid? This is a simple question. You can't get around this awful course because, anyone who has taken it will recall, you are required to be the subject of psychological experiments in order to pass it. That requirement is made by the faculty because they need those subjects for their experiments. Without a course that anyone who wants to take psychology must take, there would be no subject pool. Psychology professors lobby long and hard to make this course required for graduation from the university so that they will have even more subjects in the subject pool. They make sure every aspect of psychology is covered so that any faculty member can teach it and thus no one hogs all the subjects. A typical student signs up for a course in psychology because he wants to understand his parents, or his friends, or analyze his various personal problems. Universities make sure there is no way you can take courses on these subjects without having gone through other psychology courses that no one would want to take (on visual perception or on statistics for example). If departments responded to what students want, there would only be clinical courses offered and all those experts in experimental psychology would lose their jobs. When research interests of the faculty fail to coincide with student's course interests, ways are invented to make sure the faculty wins.

This conspiracy is not always supported by the faculty actually. I once asked some chemists who were interested in improving teaching in chemistry about the required first year chemistry curriculum. I asked what percentage of their student were premeds and got the unsurprising answer of 95%. I asked if the first year of college chemistry had anything in it at all that would be relevant to the life of a doctor. They said "no." I asked if there was chemistry that might be of importance in the career of a doctor. They said "of course." So why wasn't the chemistry curriculum revised to include the chemistry that might matter to doctors as opposed to the chemistry they will never need? Because medical schools and various certification boards and publishers had established what courses would be counted towards the requirements for medical school and there was no changing it. In this case even the chemistry faculty was frustrated by this, but there was nothing they could do about it.

JB: How does a first-year student decide what to study?

SCHANK: One of the serious problems with required courses, standard curricula, and other unchangeables in the current university system is the effect they have on the future of students. It is the rare student who comes to college knowing what he wants to be when he grows up. He usually knows what subjects interested him in high school, and maybe he knows something about the profession of his parents or other people he admires. But, those are usually the only guides he has. The fact that the high school curriculum is also unchangeable means that each student is familiar with having taken math, English, history and some science and thus their first thought is to continue this course of study.

Students want guidance. The guidance they get is not necessarily what they need however. My daughter loved biology in high school and had thoughts of becoming a biologist. When she went to sign up for college biology it turned out that she had already taken the course in high school so she was told to take a required chemistry course that was a prerequisite for second year biology. She hated the chemistry, didn't finish the full year course and had to find a new major. She never got to find out if she really liked biology.