While colleges and universities are proven to guide students in their interests along with preparing them for future opportunities, having them follow one fixed course does more than good. While some sort of guidance, in the form of required subjects, is needed for the students as most of the students entering college are not aware of the problems of the real world, the guidance should not be imposed on the young minds. Such impositions can only lead to distress. Moreover, claiming that college students prefer to follow directions rather than making their own decisions is a very broad statement. Some of the students might prefer studying subjects that are not necessary but the students have an interest in those subjects. Courses can't be compiled on the principle of one size fits all.
When students enter colleges or universities, most of them are unaware of the challenges that they will face once they are out of college and have to face the real world. For instance, most of the doctors have to start operating on actual living people. This requires a carefully regulated and planned curriculum that has fixed courses for such students so that they have enough arsenal in order to take these problems head-on. Thus, there is a need for a fixed set of subjects that all the students must study.
On the other hand, eliminating all the elective subjects will be a very extreme step. Elective subjects give the students an opportunity to pursue their varied interests. All the students are not the same. All of them have diverse interests. For instance, some engineering students have an interest in Cloud Computing whereas others may have an interest in Data Management. Both of these subjects have their own importance. Thus, forcing a student to study particular subjets can cause distress among them. It may even lead them to cause interest in the field. Ergo, elective subjects should not be eliminated.
While this passage propounds a curriculum where some of the subjects are chosen by the college or the university and some of the subjects are chosen by the students, the author's reason that college students prefer to follow directions rather than chasing their own goals couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of eminent entrepreneurs of the world are college dropouts e.g. Mark Zuckerburg dropped out of Stanford to build Facebook. He didn't want to follow the curriculum laid out by the college. Thus, saying that all college students prefer to follow directions is wrong.
In a nutshell, some form of guidance in the form of fixed courses is needed for the students so that they are aware of the problems in the actual world and have the right set of tools to solve them such as working on a real-life person in the case of medical students. But, they shouldn't be disallowed from taking electives as elective subjects help students to follow varied interests and not be bound to the courses set by the college or the university.