What is called the “Core Curriculum” is a set of courses that are required of all students at some U.S. colleges. These courses tend to fall very much in the humanities (e.g., classics, ancient and medieval history, English, art history, philosophy) and typically focus on great books, which are works widely considered to be classics in their respective fields. The core curriculum took shape at Columbia University a century ago in an effort to ensure every Columbia student graduated with a foundation in those ideas that were deemed to have made the greatest contribution to Western civilization.

The traditional “core,” as it is colloquially known, has been watered down in recent years, especially with the move towards a greater diversity of voices. Whereas the traditional core was overwhelmingly Eurocentric and comprised books largely written by what have been derogatorily referred to as “Dead White Males,” these days, due to student protests beginning in the 1990s, the core curriculum is likely to include works by female authors, non-white authors, and authors who are non-gender binary, as well as disabled or from developing countries.

The college you choose to attend may or may not have a core curriculum, but in all likelihood, it will try to achieve comparable results of ensuring students have some breadth in the courses they take – or familiarity with a broad variety of fields of inquiry and approaches to knowledge – through what are called distribution requirements. This effectively means that you will have to take some courses outside your chosen field of study. You will probably have to take a course from the humanities, one from the social sciences, and one from the natural or physical sciences. Some will include a foreign language or quantitative reasoning requirement. In some cases, there are interdisciplinary course offerings (which combine different disciplines, such as physics and philosophy or film and math) that you can choose from. These courses are usually watered down so as not to be too challenging. In fact, these courses are considered introductory and therefore there is typically no prerequisite.

There is no need to be anxious about courses that fulfill the core curriculum or distribution requirements. They just require regular attendance, completing the reading, and usually producing some written work (such as an essay or longer, term paper). Pay as close attention to these as you would any other course and you can expect to do just fine. 

Here are some titles of interdisciplinary courses found in the core or general studies curriculum of some elite U.S. colleges:

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