When class registration is open for the upcoming semester, regardless of which college at Binghamton University you’re in, DegreeWorks binds us all together through a string of general education requirements.
These are often less intellectually demanding, with many students choosing classes considered “the grade boosting option.” Among these are world languages, aesthetics and physical activity and wellness requirements, which we all collectively scramble to fill with highly sought-after “easy A” classes.
And while gen eds are intended to broaden our horizons, I wonder, in a part of our lives where we’re learning to handle very adult conflicts for the first time, be it with partners, friends, roommates, professors or even family, why aren’t there classes that explicitly teach us how to manage our emotions, communicate effectively and resolve conflict with empathy? Why isn’t emotional intelligence considered an essential in our DegreeWorks checklist?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and regulate our emotions while being attuned to the emotions of others. It determines how we manage our behavior, navigate social complexities and make personal decisions that achieve healthy and positive results.
There are moments in life, messy, confusing, deeply human moments, where the skills that truly carry us forward aren’t taught in any of our required courses. In those moments, emotional intelligence is not just helpful — it’s essential.
Academic excellence alone no longer guarantees us life’s successes. We are constantly told to build resumes, achieve top GPAs and claw our way into internships, but no one teaches us how to survive in work culture, how to communicate needs in a relationship or how to navigate grief or burnout.
These are not fringe, avant-garde skills that take complex thinking to acquire — these are basic life skills. But because of how little their importance is noted, they are not something that is emphasized to implement into our lives. And yet, they are missing from the very place designed specifically to prepare us for life: college.
College is often the first time many of us experience true independence. It’s also the first time we face adult stressors: making sure we have enough money to make it through the semester, confronting loneliness, handling relationships, dealing with academic failure and questioning who we really are.
We learn to be adults not just through reading textbooks, but by actively living adulthood. Wouldn’t it make sense to offer courses that help us make sense of them?
Although there are places in colleges where these skills may be referenced, like by residential life or other small events, a class would be better suited to teach us how to properly manage conflict with a roommate, express needs in a romantic relationship, empathize with someone different from ourselves or process rejection and failure in healthy ways. Being taught how to set boundaries, communicate assertively or identify emotional triggers and respond rather than react — all situations I’ve been in numerous times since coming to college — is essential for developing as mature, capable adults.
These aren’t hypothetical luxuries — they’re real, valuable skills that would profoundly benefit every student, regardless of major.
Some may argue that emotional intelligence should be learned at home or through experience. But this presumes everyone comes to college with the same emotional toolkit, and that’s simply not true. From my own experience since coming to college, I’ve come to realize that there are gaps in my own ability to express emotions in a healthy way or even to seek help when struggling.
Even when I go home, I find myself teaching my parents things I’ve learned from developing a larger sense of emotional intelligence in college. The same way we don’t assume academic literacy will develop on its own, we shouldn’t assume emotional literacy will either.
Some schools are beginning to wake up to this need. Yale University currently offers a course called “The Science of Well-Being,” which includes components of emotional intelligence and has become one of their most popular courses. Other schools have embedded emotional literacy into first-year experience programs or leadership development tracks.
But these efforts are still the exception, not the rule. Binghamton and colleges everywhere should recognize that education must go beyond books and lectures — it should prepare us to be whole, functioning people in the world. In the four years we spend here, we are not just learning subjects but also learning ourselves.
If the goal of our gen eds is to create well-rounded graduates, then emotional intelligence deserves a place alongside writing and science. A course where we’re not asked to memorize or to active recall, but to reflect and be present — a class that doesn’t just teach us to succeed, but to connect, grow and be human. And in a world that’s increasingly automated and consequently, emotionally fragmented, being human is the most important skill of all.
Aislinn Shrestha is a sophomore double-majoring in integrative neuroscience and speech-language pathology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.