Faculty Approves New General Education Structure
James Kelly
He/Him
Editor-in-Chief
9/30/25, Updated 10/2/25
Faculty narrowly approved a proposal Wednesday evening to restructure Plymouth State’s general education system. The proposal anchors general education around skill-focused “Pathways.” The final vote, which was open to full-time faculty, was 47-41, with one abstention.
The proposal, which was developed by a series of faculty working groups, is centered around a plan to replace the “Directions” and “Connections” general education requirements with Pathways. The current GenEd system requires four Directions classes and three Connections classes. Instead, students under the new structure will complete roughly two Pathways. To complete a Pathway, a student will have to take four classes: two lower-level and two upper-level. Current students may choose to continue with the Directions system, or to switch over to the Pathways.
The rest of the general education system remains the same, comprising an “Integrated Capstone” and three “First Year Experience” classes: Tackling a Wicked Problem, Composition, and a Mathematics Foundation.
As proposed, the nine Pathways are: Adapting to the Natural World, Communicating Strategically, Crafting the Creative Mindset, Navigating Cultures, Navigating Conflict, Quantitative Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Reasoning Ethically, and Systems-Thinking for Team Building.
After completing a Pathway, a student would earn a certificate in the corresponding skill. The specifics of the Pathways – including the “certificate” designation – are likely to change, said Jonathan Couser, a History professor who sat on the faculty working group and chairs the Habits of Mind Experience (HoME) committee, which governs general education. There may end up being more than nine Pathways, and they may be towards a “badge” or some other certificate-like token of completion. But generally, “the idea is to have these lists of courses that a student can use towards a general education… in order to get what we’ve tentatively been calling a certificate,” Couser said. The certificate would then show up on the student’s transcript, and maybe their diploma. In that way, Pathways will work like minors, with set options for lower- and higher-level classes that count towards completion.
The Pathways structure is partly modelled after similar systems at other schools, including Connecticut College. But where Connecticut College has content-orientated Pathways, like “food” and “public health,” Plymouth’s Pathways will be built around skills, said General Education Coordinator John Kruekeberg, who also sat on the faculty working group.
The kind of certificates that exist now are mostly specific and standardized. Somebody might take classes for a certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for example. “You take these classes, and you walk out with a certificate, and people know that you know something about GIS,” Kruekeberg said. The Pathway certificates won’t have the advantage of standardization, so it may be up to the student to explain the certificate on their resume. “The employer probably will have to say, ‘tell me more about this certificate you have,” he said.
The General Education Committee will also have a role in giving the certificates credibility. “There has to be an assessment element to it,” Kruekeberg said. “Prove that you really did teach this class in a way that fits a Pathway, so that it has integrity for representing our campus elsewhere.”
It will take some work to give the skill certificates meaning, but done well, Kruekeberg is confident they can be an asset for PSU graduates. “I keep coming back to the word integrity,” he said. “The faculty, we’re putting our reputations on the line when we graduate you in our major, in our minor. We need to do the same thing with certificates.”
By their nature, many majors will be already aligned with specific Pathways. Mathematics will likely align with Quantitative Inquiry, for instance. Communications and Media Studies will likely align with Communicating Strategically. For that reason, the Pathways system will only allow each major to include their classes in up to three Pathways, with one of those Pathways being dedicated as the “core focus” of the major. A student must complete at least one Pathway that is determined by the General Education Committee to be outside the three-Pathway focus of their major. Students will also have to earn another 8-9 credits that can double-count for both their major and a Pathway.
The Directions system is in part evolved out of a distributive general education model, according to Couser. Distributive structures require students to take classes from certain categories, like social sciences, math, language, or physical sciences. “What Plymouth moved to 20-odd years ago has a little bit of that with the Directions categories,” Couser said. But the Directions system doesn’t require classes to be in specific departments or academic units. “Instead, it’s done by designating courses with these tags, like ‘Past and Present,’ ‘Self and Society,’ so on and so forth,” he said.
In effect, the current system separates GedEd classes from their host programs. For example, English offers “Creative Writing.” They also offer “Writing and the Creative Process,” a GenEd that fulfills the “Creative Thought” Direction. But since the class is a GenEd, it is no longer an English (EN) class; it is an English Directions class (ENDI). That segregation has led to unintended consequences, Couser said: students who have positive experiences with their GenEds are discouraged from following up with the program because the class doesn’t count towards the major.
That’s a consequence Couser said he sees all the time with his own history classes. Directions courses like “Facing Beasts” and “Magic, Then and Now,” tend to attract students from all kinds of majors. “If a student in there does get hooked on it and says, ‘Wow, this is really interesting stuff. I want to do more with this,’ what do they do? It’s Directions; the class is segregated off,” Couser said.
The Pathways system will instead count GenEd classes towards both the Pathway and the major. If those History classes were offered as GenEds within the History major, as opposed to distinct “Past and Present” History Directions, Couser said, then interested students would already have some credit towards a History major.
After an early version of the faculty working group pitched the Pathways to the Board of Trustees in June, the BoT gave PSU a two-year deadline to implement the system, Kruekeberg said. That means the Pathways would have to be in place for fall, 2026. The deadline to settle the catalogue for the school year is functionally January 1st, so to make the two-year window, faculty needed to approve at least a version of the plan this fall.
There is still room for change though, Kruegeberg said. “The way this proposal is set up, is that it allows for iteration. So what we really need to get passed is sort of the skeleton,” he said.
The GenEd change comes at the same time as faculty cuts and the six-school restructuring of PSU broadly, and though the GenEd reforms are separate, the changes share the same root cause: the State of New Hampshire cut funding to the university system. In turn, PSU has been forced to cut its costs, else it risk the Board of Trustees merging it with UNH. So far, those cuts have taken the form of a Separation Incentive Program, through which some faculty may take a voluntary exit package. The GenEd reforms are not themselves meant to cut faculty or programs, but the change is designed to accommodate a college with fewer faculty.
“It makes sense to change Directions at a time we’re trying to change the university to be more sustainable,” Krueckeberg said. When he first started teaching history at PSU, before Directions, roughly one third of his upper-level classes were filled by GenEd students. When Directions was introduced, the GenEd population got smaller. The Pathways could reverse that, he said. “What they’re saying right now is look how empty your major class is, and we can talk about that for all disciplines, not just the ones that are kind of in the news,” he said. “Everybody can be helped by making a GenEd program where the Pathways classes can count in a major as well as general education.”
Now, programs split their time between major classes and GenEds, in some instances even teaching parallel versions of similar classes, as in “Creative Writing” and “Writing and the Creative Process,” or Political Science’s “American Government” and “Being an American.” That’s an issue, Couser said. “To have this separate category of classes that don’t count towards majors… are we going to have enough teaching personnel to be able to offer this whole separate batch?”
The bulk of GenEd classes would be hosted by programs within the new School of Integrated Liberal Arts, Couser said, and Pathways were designed specifically with underenrolled classes and programs in mind. Right now, Directions classes can provide a stable enrollment floor for smaller programs, but they also hold the programs back, Couser said. “You’ll have a field like Linguistics or Art History, where we have a professor around, but all they can teach is Directions classes – they’re too small of a program to have enough majors,” he said. “There’s no way for them to really build up, because all they ever get is students taking their Directions classes.”
Without the Directions structure making some classes mandatory, in a sense, students will vote for GenEds with their feet. “There’s a possibility that some classes will find themselves underenrolled if they no longer have the sort of mandatory ‘this is in the Directions category you need’ sort of thing,” Couser said. “On the other hand, I think you may actually see the opposite happening in a lot of cases, where students are seeing, ‘oh, this is a class I can use towards this skill Pathway.’”
Even without the budget pressures, Couser said he would support the reforms on their merits. “We’re having our hand forced on it, and having to do this in a much more rapid timeline than I think anybody is comfortable with,” he said. “I don’t think that, in itself, is a drawback to the model itself. It’s just making it difficult to hash out the details”