<p>Which top universities/LACs don't have core curricula?</p>
<p>LAC - Amherst
University - Brown</p>
<p>Rice University has distribution requirements. Actually, many schools only have distribution requirements, not actual core requirements.</p>
<p>When we refer to core curricula, usually we’re talking about only two schools: Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Many more schools (the majority) have distribution requirements (which require exposure to a minimum number of courses in various departments, but without any attempt to organize them into an interdisciplinary program shared by all students.)</p>
<p>If you are asking which schools have Open Curriculum programs, then in addition to Brown and Amherst, they include Grinnell, Hampshire, New College (FL), Sarah Lawrence, Smith, and Wesleyan (CT).</p>
<p>
What’s the difference between the core offered at Columbia and UChicago and that offered at other schools? Is the former more comprehensive?</p>
<p>We all need to use the same nomenclature. Very few schools outside of Columbia and Chicago offer a core curriculum. MANY schools offer curricula with distribution requirements, which are a a far cry from a core curriculum. The core curriculum at Columbia requires all students to take the same set of core classes, where all students take the same classes in different sections, with identical major exams. Chicago’s core allows students to take different classes within narrow subject matters. Schools with distribution requirements allow students to choose electives within general subject matters (e.g., science and/or math, social sciences, humanities, arts, world culture, etc.).</p>
<p>The above poster has it right, but to give you a more concrete example of distributive requirements: At my school, there are about 8 distribs you need to meet, but its very flexible in how you do so. So for an art distrib, you can take an actual art class, a photography class, an art history class, that sort of thing. For a Quantitative and Deductive something or another (Too many acronyms) you can take math, or the history of time which is co taught by the math and comparative literature departments, or a number of linguistics courses focusing more on syntax. Then there are a lot of broad distribs covering courses with international foucs, courses with a thinking about society focus, and courses with thinking about the way people think focus (I took a medieval intellectual history course, for example). You also have to take technology and science courses, one of which has to be a lab, and these could be anything from astronomy to biological anthropology to organic chemistry.</p>
<p>That’s paticular to my school, but its similar at any school with distribs…you just have to take a breadth of courses, but not any set courses, like a core requires. I could theoretically have fullfilled all but two of my distribs in my 2 majors, for example, but there were lots of courses outside my majors I wanted to take that also filled distribs.</p>
<p>At Chicago, there are no undergraduate departments per se. Professors who teach undergraduates are appointed to “The College”, not to an undergraduate English or Math department. The Core is not comprised of N arbitrary selections that each student picks from a Chinese Menu of usual department offerings. They are interdisciplinary general education courses in the humanities, social sciences, biological and physical sciences. These courses fill the first two years of study; they are developed specifically for the Core. Often they are organized around broad themes (such as “Self, Culture, and Society”), which are explored in seminars where students discuss seminal books (or other primary source materials) that address these themes from different perspectives. </p>
<p><a href=“https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/commoncore.shtml[/url]”>https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/commoncore.shtml</a></p>
<p>The Chicago and Columbia Core programs are a little different from each other, but share common historical roots in early 20th century reaction against academic over-specialization. They express an assumption that there is some “knowledge most worth having”, which can and should be discussed in non-technical language by any educated person. What knowledge is most worth having? This is defined (and frequently re-defined) by the faculty community, which contrasts with the Open Curriculum where each student defines his or her own individual program (often with the help of a faculty advisor).</p>
<p>I believe Hamilton also has an open curriculum (just noticed it was missing from this thread).</p>