<p>There are many, many searchable threads in the archives on schools with "open" curriculums. Off the top of my head: Brown, Vassar, Amherst, Hampshire, Hobart & William Smith, et al. Smith and Wesleyan also have technically "open" curriculums but loose distribution requirements for Latin honors. </p>
<p>Many students who would like to avoid heavy core curriculums aren't necessarily anemic to requirements; they simply want to pursue their own varied interests in-depth.</p>
<p>An example of flexible requirements: 2-3 courses each in math/science, social science, and humanities, and perhaps a year of foreign language and/or a "quantitative reasoning" requirement (fulfilled by e.g. econ, psych, or logic, not just math).</p>
<p>So: what colleges and universities have flexible core requirements, specifically excluding open curriculum schools? I'm especially interested in public universities with low/flexible cores, since my impression is that they tend to be heavier in that aspect.</p>
<p>I'll start off with a list drawn from my own research, primarily LACs because that was my interest. Since I was researching specifically for non-math science requirements, my perspective is a bit skewed; feel free to challenge any of the names below.</p>
<p>Thanks so much to keilexandra for starting this thread-- as I’d said on another thread, my daughter has some very focused interests, areas that she’d like to study in depth. I want her to be able to do this in college, and a heavy core curriculum can require so many courses that there’s barely enough space to go deeply into one major, let alone two. So we’re looking for colleges where there’s plenty of room for a student to make his/her own choices. </p>
<p>Speaking of larger schools, I thought UNH looked fairly flexible, but I’m not great at parsing the websites yet. I’d love to hear more from anyone who has looked into this, or is at a school that allows students to have more control over their own curriculum.</p>
<p>What I recommend doing as general practice, if curriculum design is important to you, is to Google “site:SCHOOL.edu graduation requirements” or sometimes “general education requirements” if the former doesn’t come up with anything useful on the first page. You should be looking for an comprehensive online catalog (so another way is to search the school website for the catalog, which is sometimes in PDF form).</p>
<p>Then, look at the distribution/core requirements and add up the number of courses/credits that would not otherwise be taken. For instance, I will probably be a humanities major but I’m interested in many different areas of social science; I usually disregard all humanities/social science requirements because those are courses that I would take as electives anyway. Schools with stricter cores (e.g. UChicago, Columbia, Scripps) will often have integrated core courses that don’t count toward any major or minor; since that will take up a course slot no matter what, the calculations usually work out unfavorably.</p>
<p>Keil - What are we going to do when you get to Swat and you’re too rapturously busy to share all your research and insights with us? Will you be available for hire as an admissions consultant? :)</p>
<p>Conn’s is pretty flexible. I think there’s two requirments where I didn’t see a class right away that I would’ve taken anyways and had to think about when/how I would fufill them. </p>
<p>What does your D want a BFA in? (That was you, right?) …Art majors at Conn end up getting some of their own studio space by junior year, I think. The Art building also had HUGE windows to look out of, really nice looking.</p>
<p>I actually liked that Conn had a Museum Studies Certificate; I expect the Arts students get a lot of chances to display their stuff, either in the Art Center or elsewhere on campus. There are some theaters and dance stuff too, but I don’t know as much about that.</p>
<p>Scripps was so-so about the CORE thing. There’s three classes you HAVE to take in a series called CORE but two of them are on different topics, or self-created, and then there’s distribution requirements, and a mandatory writing class.</p>
<p>It’s a big skew towards humanities in CORE:</p>
<p>A lot of girls had two majors, but since you have to write a thesis for each major, they generally made them ‘dual majors’ which meant only one thesis combining the subjects.</p>
<p>^Barnard’s requirements look more specific than those that I’ve listed previously; it resembles Carleton’s new requirements, and Bowdoin’s and (kind of) Middlebury’s with more emphasis on science. For instance, Middlebury has 8 “categories” and a student must satisfy any 7 of them; IIRC 1 lab science course was one category, so it could be avoided. I did not include it on the list because it would be very difficult to avoid taking multiple distributed humanities/soft socsci courses. Barnard requires a full year of the same lab science. (I, uh, wrote all that from memory. Eek.)</p>
<p>My personal definition of “flexible” core requirements is the ability to easily “sub-specialize” (second major, multiple minors) in fields unrelated to the first major. It’s not much use to be able to pick among 20 history courses if you hate history but love philosophy, for instance.</p>
<p>But I leave it up to CC members to define their own “flexible.” Links and details are always good, for lurkers and future researchers. </p>
<p>sunmachine - I stand corrected. Grinnell’s open curriculum is kind of between Brown/Amherst/Vassar and Smith/Wesleyan; no distribution requirements but “no more than 48 credits in any one department or 92 credits in any one division,” which works out to 12 and 23 courses respectively. It is definitely more of an open curriculum than a distributed core, so it belongs in the summary rather than the list proper.</p>
<p>Yurtle, I loved Scripps (far more than you or applicannot did, heh) but the core was NOT a pro. Three required humanities Core classes that are really interesting but don’t count toward distribution or major/minor, plus an absolutely required writing class that might as well be Core. Their distribution requirements are also rather specific, e.g. “history” and “lab science” instead of “humanities” and “science.” It would have been impossible for me to do two unrelated majors and also study abroad without overloading half my semesters. (Despite this I loved it enough to apply and consider it a high choice among my matches. Go figure.)</p>
<p>gadad - You’ll have to wait four years, maybe, until I end up in library school and will be doing this sort of thing for a living. ;)</p>
<p>Yurtle-- she’ll likely try for a theater BFA, but she is deep into history too, and looking forward to psych, and government, and she loves languages. Conn sounds very good (Barnard too)-- but she has a very hard time with geometry and other visual/spatial things which keeps her math and science grades down and may hurt her SAT’s too. (she’s in 10th now) That’s another reason why a heavy core wouldn’t be good for her-- she’s very strong on one side of the brain and weak on the other.</p>
<p>Dartmouth and Middlebury should be added to the list. I believe both have distributive requirements. Dartmouth’s at least are very flexible, but still there.</p>
<p>You do have to study abroad, but every student gets about 3k to do so, I believe. They’re very into intercultural understanding. I think flexibility sometimes depends on whether or not the student is interested in a wide variety of classes or not. Obviously, if the student couldn’t care less about the global field, then Goucher is probably not their best bet…</p>
<p>Yeah, CORE ended up being a big minus for me. I don’t know if you remember, but two of my classmates went to Scripps too, and we all agreed that CORE sounded like our current classes. And we were so busy busting our hinds to not have to take an intro English class that Writing 50 was a joke. </p>
<p>Gwen- I SUCK at math. Well known fact. I try very very hard, but am just not math inclined. So Conn telling me I could take Math of Money or Maths from a cultural perspective? HUGE PLUS. I’m good at bio, but bombed chem (whoops, math) and did well in Environmental Science which is a huge thing at conn. There’s a lot of wiggle room, frankly. (And I LOVE languages. Took french and Japanese in HS, because, er, I felt like it.) :] </p>
<p>My interviewer was also supremely friendly, and I was a little sad to tell them I wasn’t going, because they were a great second. They also sent me letters that were actually signed by real people (this is a big thing for me, and I don’t know why) and had some great things- like a Nations Fair type deal.</p>
<p>^Yeah, once you start looking at specific catalogs, you’ll realize the huge variety of curriculums that fall under “liberal arts.” I was looking for schools where I could double-major in English and CS, and where I had to take few/no lab science courses; I didn’t care about math or writing or foreign language requirements. A different student, also looking for a “flexible” core, would have very different priorities.</p>
<p>I personally ranked curriculum style/design as one of the most important criteria in my search, equal to strength in prospective major departments. The best (and most time-consuming) way is what I outlined above, searching college catalogs and reading between the administrative jargon. But I hope that this thread can serve as a jumping-off point.</p>
<p>I think Knox actually explains what makes something flexible pretty well. Being able to hit some of the requirements within your major easily. So we can find schools like this…</p>
<p>Hamilton and Amherst are open curriculum (sorry, omitted Hamilton from OP). There have been threads before on “no core” schools, but remarkably few on “flex-core” schools.</p>
<p>Start by eliminating the very few schools on a Core Curriculum plan. Then eliminate the dozen or so selective schools with variations on the Open Curriculum concept. Then sweep aside a few outliers (Great Books colleges, work/study schools, Deep Springs College, etc.)</p>
<p>What are the remainders? Most colleges and universities, in fact, have “flexible (but not nonexistent) core requirements”, a.k.a. distribution requirements. Though the variations on this theme probably are nearly as numerous as the colleges themselves.</p>
<p>^As I said upthread, flexible can be defined very differently. The thread title was cued by another poster.</p>
<p>I noted on a related thread that there are two broad types of distribution requirements: 7-10 and 3-4. Generally I don’t consider schools with 7-10 specific GE categories to be “flexible,” though they are indeed “distribution” requirements. You’re absolutely right that the variations are numerous; but there is always some way to organize in smaller categories.</p>
<p>Keil said: “My personal definition of “flexible” core requirements is the ability to easily “sub-specialize” (second major, multiple minors) in fields unrelated to the first major.”</p>
<p>^^^Bates pretty much requires you to do this. But I think you have to decide your major and your sub-specialties early on in order to get everything done in four years. I think this would be great for those with diverse interests who know what they want to do; not so good for the person who just wants to do a major and fill up the rest of the time with random electives.</p>
<p>Here’s how a Bates student described Bates’s version of flexible core in another thread:</p>
<p>"I’m a sophomore at Bates - the Gen Ed requirements can be a little confusing, but I’ll try to simplify them! Bates requires a “major plus two”: you have to have a major, and then two more things, either another major, a minor or a General Education Concentration (GEC: a clump of 4 classes that relate to each other in some way. For example, a GEC in Film and Media studies would be 4 classes relating to film; a GEC in The Ancient World might involve some history classes, Classical and Medieval Studies classes, etc.). These “plus twos” can be mismatched: you can major and double minor, major and double GEC, double major and minor, etc. Apart from that, there’s a science and math requirement: the SLQs. You have to take one science reasoning course (S), one science laboratory course (L), and one quantitative reasoning course (Q).</p>
<p>Double majoring can be complicated with the Gen Ed requirements: the best way to accomplish everything you want to is to plan early, and get requirements out of the way as soon as you can. The second major does take care of one of the “plus two” requirement, but it’s important to decide on either a minor or a GEC early, and get ahead on the SLQ’s, since a double major does mean two separate theses at Bates: usually, double majors write one thesis per semester their senior year, and you don’t want to have to take four classes to finish up requirements while you’re writing thesis."</p>
<p>Hamilton didn’t look completely open?..they had certain requirements they wanted people to meet. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I just said it in the other thread, but I’ll leave it here for relevance too- </p>
<p>That sort of flexibility requires these numbers:</p>
<p>The average # of classes a student will take in four years.
The # of core classes.</p>
<p>So your first number should be: </p>
<p>The Average # of classes total - # of core classes. </p>
<p>Take this number. Look at the average # of classes required for a major. The avg # for a minor. Can you double major in the remaining classes? Major/minor?</p>
<p>EX: </p>
<p>Total AVG #: 32 classes in 4 years
Core #: 7</p>
<p>32-7 = 25 classes not part of the core. </p>
<p>If your major is going to take up 20 classes, it’s not really all that flexible. But 10? maybe more so. 15? What about minors? are they 6 classes or 8? Perhaps 5? </p>
<p>Ideally no matter what, you should be able to major/minor or double major in the remaining amount of classes. But even more ideally, you should be able to count some of the core towards a major or minor</p>
<p>I’ve only “heard” about Hamilton’s open curriculum, haven’t checked into it personally so I will take your word for it!</p>
<p>Your guideline is wonderful. I would add that you should also look to see whether your prospective majors/minors would double-count with any distribution requirements.</p>
)</p>
And we were so busy busting our hinds to not have to take an intro English class that Writing 50 was a joke. </p>