Harvard has long required that students take a set of courses outside of their concentration in order to ensure that their undergraduate education encompasses a broad range of topics and approaches. As part of the Harvard College Curricular Review, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to replace the existing, thirty-year-old Core Curriculum requirements with a new Program in General Education in order to align these requirements with the educational needs of Harvard College students at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In contrast with the Core Curriculum, which required that students be exposed to a number of different “ways of knowing,” the new Program seeks explicitly to “connect a student’s liberal education – that is, an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry, rewarding in its own right – to life beyond college.” In addition, the new Program in General Education seeks to provide new opportunities for students to learn – and faculty to teach – in ways that cut across traditional departmental and intra-University lines.

Please go to the Harvard College Program in General Education website.