The Program in General Education

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. This new program seeks to "connect a student's liberal education ... to life beyond the 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. These changes take effect with the Class of 2013, entering in 2009.

In fulfilling the General Education requirement, each student will select one course from each of the following eight areas:

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding
Culture and Belief
Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning
Ethical Reasoning
Science of Living Systems
Science of the Physical Universe
Societies of the World
The United States in the World

For the latest information about the new program, please visit http://www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu/.