William Earnhardt Duncan
What is a Wicked Problem? How does it effect me?
A wicked problem is a dilemma that does not seem to have one concrete, comprehensive answer. Wicked problems exist all over our world, from poverty to economics to individual rights. In the below video, you will learn about a wicked problem that plagues Hampden-Sydney College. There are three parts of the wicked problem of how Hampden-Sydney College handles outside credits and its treatment of the current liberal arts curriculum.
1) Due to an extremely difficult credit acceptance process, H-SC students find that many of the courses that they take in H-SC approved international studies programs are not, according to H-SC, applicable to one's major. This causes students, like me, to either load up on major/minor required courses later in their careers when they should be focussing on capstone courses or enrol in May Term/another semester of college. When tuition and student loans are as high as they are today, many students simply cannot afford the later option and risk overloading their schedule and hurting their academic performance. Students who are on the fence about studying abroad are often scared off by these options, as I have seen through my experience as a Study Abroad Representative for H-SC.
2) Transfer students run into a similar problem. While it is important for H-SC to stand strong in what it believes important for its students to learn, the school gives many transfer students extreme difficulty in transferring credits that they have earned at other institutions. Again, this affects the student's ability to graduate in the typical four years. Being a small, liberal arts college means that tuition is relatively high. Transfer students see that H-SC disregards many past credits as a strong barrier to entry, which hurts the long-term vaibility of the school.
3) How honest are we about H-SC's current liberal arts core curriculum? Yes, gaining a wide array of knowledge and experience is crucial to "learning to learn" and becoming a Hampden-Sydney Man, but the way in which the school is managing the education of student needs improvement. Western Culture, Fine Arts, Rhetoric, and Science are all important subjects that contribute to the broad education that H-SC promotes. Upon arrival, H-SC freshmen are asked to take placement exams for language, math, and rhetoric. These exams are used to place students into a level where they are comfortably challenged. However, being forced to fulfil excessive course requirements restricts students from broadening their education at H-SC. To put it bluntly, H-SC's current liberal arts curriculum is not fully living up to its name. One out of every three students who attends H-SC is studying some sort of Economics degree with a Rhetoric minor. This student enjoys, when completed his major, minor, and core requirements, a total of nine credit hours to study his choice of subject. This only gives that student three classes to further expand his experience in other fields.
What can students, faculty, and the H-SC community do to alleviate this wicked problem?