Office of the Provost
Office of the Provost

Core Curriculum

University Core Requirements

The core requirements that form the first tier, the common experience across the University, are interpreted and carried out differently across the five undergraduate schools. The shared core requirements can be found on the Undergraduate Bulletin.

Learning Goals

The basic purpose of general education is the development of fundamental abilities such as inquiry, analysis, research, critical reading, creative thinking and expression, and communication in multiple modes and media. The Georgetown Core accomplishes these by expanding students’ understanding of the traditions, histories, technologies, and ideas that have shaped the world. In addition, as participants in an intellectual community, students learn to communicate and act with civility, respect differences, address questions of diversity, and engage in difficult dialogues around challenging ideas.

Challenging and complex problems often require the insights of multiple areas of knowledge, both qualitative and quantitative, and the capacity to think and act creatively across fields. The Georgetown Core attends to these by giving students a working appreciation of the questions, methods, contributions, and limitations of various disciplines in addressing complex problems. In their academic work, students are encouraged to incorporate such scholarly ideals as interdisciplinarity, integration, risk-taking, and collaboration.

The Jesuit ideal of cura personalis inspires the Georgetown community to value integration of the intellectual, ethical, spiritual, social, and civic dimensions of life and to do so with wisdom, passion, self-reflection, and interior freedom. The Georgetown Core helps to accomplish this by encouraging students to explore critically their own beliefs and assumptions and consider new, diverse, and unfamiliar beliefs.

Georgetown aims to graduate “men and women for others” who have, as a central life commitment, an active and sustained pursuit of the common good. The Georgetown Core helps to accomplish this by encouraging students to exercise integrative judgments in the face of moral complexities and to take on the responsibilities of global citizenship in a spirit of service and justice.