Some people think that all university students should be required to study subjects outside their main field, such as history or philosophy.

Some people believe that university students must study other subjects which are not connected to their main subject, for example history or philosophy. I agree with this opinion because it is useful for students, but I think it should not be for every student.

Firstly, studying different subjects helps students to think better. If a student only studies engineering, he knows a lot about engineering but he does not know about society or history. When he works in a company later, he must talk with many different people and understand their problems. Subjects like philosophy teach students how to argue and how to look at a problem from another side. These skills are useful in every job.

Secondly, many people change their career after university. A student who studies chemistry may work in business or in media after some years. If he studied only chemistry, this change is more difficult for him. So extra subjects give students more choice in the future and they are not limited to one area.

However, I do not think that all students should do this. Some courses, such as medicine, are already very long and difficult. Medical students study for six years and they have very little free time. If we add more subjects for them, they will be very tired and their main study will suffer. Also, if students are forced to take a subject, sometimes they do not study it seriously and they only want to pass the exam.

In conclusion, I agree that studying subjects outside the main field is good for students because it develops their thinking and helps their career. But universities should decide it for each course, and it should not be a rule for all students.

It is sometimes argued that every undergraduate, whatever their specialism, should be obliged to take courses in unrelated disciplines such as history or philosophy. I broadly agree that this breadth is valuable, although I would resist making it a universal requirement.

The main argument in favour is that a narrow degree develops knowledge without necessarily developing judgement. A student who spends four years exclusively on software engineering will graduate as a competent programmer, but the questions they face at work are rarely purely technical: whether a product is fair to its users, how to explain a decision to people outside the field, how to weigh two defensible options. Disciplines like philosophy and history exist to train exactly that kind of reasoning, and the skills they build are transferable in a way that technical content is not.

There is also a practical case. Careers are far less linear than they were, and a significant proportion of graduates end up working outside the field they trained in. Such graduates rely on general analytical and communication skills rather than on the specific content of their degree, and a curriculum that has given them some experience of a second discipline leaves them better placed to move.

That said, applying the rule to all students ignores real constraints. Vocational degrees such as medicine and architecture are already unusually demanding, and adding compulsory outside courses to that pressure risks weakening the training that actually qualifies the student to practise. There is a further danger that compulsion produces the opposite of engagement: a subject taken only because it is required often becomes a token exercise, passed and forgotten.

In conclusion, I agree that exposure to other disciplines makes graduates more capable and more adaptable, but universities should build this into individual programmes where the workload allows, rather than imposing it on every student regardless of course.

A recurring proposal in higher education is that undergraduates should be required to study outside their specialism — a scientist obliged to read philosophy, an economist to study history. The principle behind it is sound, and I agree with it; where the proposal overreaches is in the word all, which turns a good educational instinct into a blunt instrument.

The case for breadth rests on what a siloed degree cannot teach. Technical training produces expertise, but expertise is not the same as judgement, and most of the consequential decisions a graduate makes are decisions about trade-offs rather than about facts. The humanities are unusual in that their entire method is the weighing of competing accounts: reading two historians disagree about the same event teaches something about evidence that no amount of laboratory work does. Those are intellectual habits rather than items of knowledge, and habits, unlike content, do not go out of date.

The economic argument reinforces this. Graduates now move between fields repeatedly, and a degree is increasingly a starting point rather than a description of a career. What survives that shift is not the syllabus but the general capacity to analyse an unfamiliar problem and explain a conclusion to people who do not share your training — precisely what a second discipline develops.

The objection to universality is not that breadth is undesirable but that compulsion tends to defeat it. Where a requirement is bolted on to an already saturated professional degree, students meet it strategically: they select the course with the lightest assessment, do the minimum, and take from it nothing that resembles the intellectual widening the policy intended. Had the same students encountered the subject as a genuine choice, with room in the timetable to take it seriously, the outcome would be very different. The failure is one of design, not of the underlying idea.

My position, then, is that universities should treat intellectual breadth as an obligation on the institution rather than on the individual student: every programme should be built with the space and the incentives for it, and most students should graduate having used that space. That is a stronger commitment than a compulsory module, and a more honest one than pretending a requirement can manufacture curiosity.