With sociology removed from the general education curriculum in Florida, at least two arguments could be made opposing the move. The first reason involves the value of the discipline’s knowledge and methods:

What do students learn by taking sociology? What is lost if fewer students do? It struck John Reynolds, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, that these are the kinds of questions his discipline can help answer. While the Board of Governors overseeing the state’s public universities on Wednesday voted against a proposal to pause and collect more evidence to assess the impact before taking its vote, the “budding social scientists” in his “Sociology of Education” course were learning the very skills needed to conduct such research. So he walked students through the process in class on Thursday.

Reynolds and his students examined various arguments key players had made for and against keeping sociology. Then Reynolds split the 37 students into small groups and had each propose a research study to evaluate those claims using one of the research methods they covered in the course — school ethnography, intensive interviews, social survey, and analysis of school administrative data. Reynolds plans to award a small prize to each group whose proposals “were most detailed and true to the strengths of the method they were assigned,” he told The Chronicle in an email…

Offering a course as an avenue for meeting a general-education requirement signifies that the state regards it as important, said Alison C. Cares, an associate professor and the associate chair of the sociology department at the University of Central Florida. And while there’s overlap among disciplines — students have many options for developing critical-thinking skills — sociology has something unique to offer, she believes. Sociology is a discipline that “really jolts students out of an individualistic approach,” Cares said. Of course people have individual agency, she added, but at the same time, “there are predictable patterns, based on how society is organized, that make decisions and actions more or less likely.” Understanding that can enhance the way a doctor cares for a patient, or a teacher instructs a student, or a businessperson leads a company.

The second reason involves the way that required general education courses help students find courses and what they want to study:

Students will still be able to take introductory sociology — and it could still meet other university-specific requirements — but professors anticipate that its absence from the gen-ed menu could significantly reduce enrollment. This is partly because of exposure — a large share of students likely have found or been pointed to the course in order to fulfill the social-sciences requirement. Sociology is what one professor called a “found major,” that is, one that students might not have heard about before they get to campus, but fall in love with during their first course…

That’s not the only problem. Some degree programs (or combinations thereof) have such exhaustive requirements that students often look to meet as many of them as efficiently as possible, so they are unlikely to take other courses even if they really want to. The ability to meet a state requirement while taking introductory sociology is especially helpful, Aranda said, for students planning to attend medical school, many of whom have sought out the course since the MCAT added a section on social sciences nearly a decade ago.

I imagine faculty in many disciplines would make this same argument. Their field of study offers a unique perspective that students benefit from. This is the reason we have different academic disciplines: they have particular ways that they study, write, and operate. Additionally, general education classes offer gateways for more students into that field of study. Not all disciplines are represented in required courses so this is valuable real estate.

Sociology and other disciplines will continue to have to make arguments for why they should be included in curricula and why students should take their courses. If college courses and majors are a marketplace where students respond to different incentives, disciplines offer different perceived advantages and disadvantages. Whether this market logic should determine the worthiness of disciplines and their presence is worth debating but there is no doubt that the market does have some patterns and cycles.

As a sociologist who has regularly taught Introduction to Sociology over the years, these two issues come up in this class. What value does sociology have to college students who may never touch sociology again or know little about it? I enjoy teaching sociology and its methods so this is a fun challenge.