Educational Outcomes

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What the College Offers You

An education in the liberal arts and sciences provides a broad spectrum of study in a number of fields in which students develop their ability to think in complex ways about information, experiences, and the conditions and challenges they will encounter throughout their lives. Fundamentally, pursuing a liberal education means honing one’s critical and imaginative capacities, learning about oneself in nature and culture, and gaining experience with views of the world radically unlike one’s own. How one pursues these goals is highly individual and the college relies on each student and his/her faculty advisor to design a sensible, challenging, and appropriate course of study.  In the course of doing so, however, students are expected to complete a course of study that has certain common qualities and allows them to develop abilities in the following areas:

• familiarity with the several different ways of knowing that are reflected in the various disciplines and fields of study within the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and sciences;
• cultural breadth (both geographical and temporal);
• effective writing and quantitative skills;
• facility in a foreign language beyond the introductory level;
• imaginative and critical thinking
• Students are expected to concentrate on one particular field through which they develop their imaginative and critical thinking capacities.  They must demonstrate a thorough grasp of their selected field. 

These educational goals are stated in Courses of Study along with the distribution requirements which help students accomplish them.

A New Curriculum 

On October 30, 2018, the College of Arts & Sciences faculty approved a new undergraduate curriculum to be implemented over the next two years. The new curriculum focuses on the theme of exploration and reaffirms the college’s commitment to a liberal arts and sciences education. Changes will make the curriculum easier for students to navigate, simplify the graduation requirements and expand student opportunities for interdisciplinary work and faculty opportunities for innovative teaching. This new curriculum will be fully implemented in Fall 2020.