Required courses question

August 18, 2013 3:15 PM

I went to a very elite, prestigious college that had no required courses: none, no math, no English, none. Would someone point me to a list of colleges and/or degrees that do not have core requirements?

I am also interested in colleges that do not require math or English. I currently work at a small non-prestigious college and the administration is always saying all college degrees require math and English.

I am not interested in colleges or degrees that require minimal math or English. I am only interested in colleges that require none.

posted by fifilaru to Education (36 answers total)

Brown asks that students demonstrate competence in writing, which any edit/revise process in any class can qualify as. There is no math req.
posted by jwells at 3:20 PM on August 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

UC Berkeley does not really have a math requirement. Letters and Science has the so-called Quantitative Reasoning requirement which people overwhelmingly meet in high school (this is distinct from the breadth requirements, which don't require math). Natural Resources has no such requirement (though it may be that every major requires a math class, which I assume is the case for the other colleges except L&S).

There are two UC-level requirements: Subject A (basic writing) and American History and Institutions. Berkeley has one campus-level requirement: American Cultures.
posted by hoyland at 3:25 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Most universities in Australia have no 'required' courses outside of your major, if you're not limited to the USA.

That is, there's no required math or English, for example, for most majors. But a physics major would have to do math classes.

A small number of universities here have lately been 'moving towards the USA model' and requiring 'x courses that are not related to your major' - which friends have satisfied with everything from 'Wine tasting courses' to languages/etc - very few people do math/English/history however.
posted by Ashlyth at 3:27 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

(This was a tad frustrating as a math major, as most people could pretty easily kill a breadth requirement or two with a course required for their major, whereas there was precisely one math class that met a breadth requirement, and it was one I'd met with a random community college class coming in.)

Oh, and it turns out Subject A has been renamed to the somewhat more obvious entry level writing requirement. Most people met Subject A and AH&I in high school (or those who went to high school in the US anyway).
posted by hoyland at 3:29 PM on August 18, 2013

Amherst and Johns Hopkins are both schools which have no course requirements beyond that of your major. The key phrase you might want (in so far as dealing with U.S. schools at least) would be "open curriculum."
posted by zer0render at 3:30 PM on August 18, 2013

It looks like Smith just requires a writing-intensive course. Amherst requires a first-year seminar, but again, it doesn't look like there are distribution requirements. Grinnell too.

Sarah Lawrence has some distribution requirements, but it sounds like you can get out of taking math by taking a science class instead.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 3:30 PM on August 18, 2013

UPenn (Ivy League) doesn't have a math requirement per se; the courses that fulfill the "Natural Science and Mathematics requirement include things like "Philosophy of Biology." So students can go through without taking an actual math class. Same for the other sectors -- the core requirements emphasize approaches rather than specific skills. There is, however, a critical writing requirement.
posted by DoubleLune at 3:30 PM on August 18, 2013

Grinnell also has an open curriculum.
posted by pitrified at 3:31 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

I went to Earlham college, I didn't need to take a math course. I did have to take a science class if I didn't take math.
posted by geegollygosh at 3:34 PM on August 18, 2013

I am not interested in colleges or degrees that require minimal math or English. I am only interested in colleges that require none.

Requirements are so broad that "math" or "English" could be technically avoided by many college curriculums. Eg, the requirement is that you take a "quantitative reasoning" class, but that could be any number of things. A math class counts, but so does formal logic. Or the quantitative reasoning requirement can be avoided simply by scoring more than 600 on the SATs.

"English"? Well, you don't have to take an English class-- it could be any number of literature-type classes that will fulfill this requirement.

But plenty of colleges have open curriculums, Brown, already mentioned, being one of the most famous.
posted by deanc at 3:37 PM on August 18, 2013

I graduated with a four year degree from Goddard College in 2001. In 2002, it shut down its on-campus program, but at the time, it had no required courses at all. Also no grades, tests, lectures, etc. They now offer only low-residency programs, some of which operate under the same guidelines as the on campus program.
posted by eunoia at 3:38 PM on August 18, 2013

Also, many people who went to Goddard also considered going to Evergreen State College, which offers a Bachelor of Arts degree with no required courses.
posted by eunoia at 3:47 PM on August 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

A family member of mine went to Euene Lang in the New School and liked it a lot. As far as I know it also has no core curriculum requirements.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:48 PM on August 18, 2013

Hampshire College requires things like "quantitative reasoning" and "writing skills" but doesn't require "English" or "Math." I don't think there are any core courses that everyone has to take. Marlboro College is similar but more so.

When I attended the College of William and Mary (part of the Virginia state university system) in the late 90s, we had no specific core courses but we did have to choose courses under a complicated system called "Area-Sequence" that was supposed to fill a similar function. I didn't take any classes in the English department, but I had to demonstrate writing skills in the area of my major. I think I could have avoided math, too, but it was required for my major. Pretty sure there was a foreign language requirement separate from Area-Sequence. I think my class was one of the last to do Area-Sequence.
posted by mskyle at 3:52 PM on August 18, 2013

At the University of Chicago, which is known for its core curriculum (i.e., there's supposed to be a math & English requirement,) you could take computer science in place of math.
posted by coppermoss at 4:18 PM on August 18, 2013

Oh, I guess by deanc's standards, Pomona College (and maybe the other Claremont schools?) meets your requirements.

You have to take classes in five areas. English is an "area 1" class, and that area can instead be fulfilled by a course in music, art, dance, theater, or whatever. Math is "area 5", which also includes computer science, philosophy (formal logic), and stats (including psych stats, soc stats, whatever), and (at least when I went there) a class called "Pencil & Paper Games", which was...definitely not a math class.

more info
posted by goodbyewaffles at 4:20 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

I shudder to think how no required English would go at state schools, just on the whole; I think there's an element there of just not wanting to deal with the edge cases of people who're fully competent. But, I'd heard this was true so did go to verify, at least one totally not-exceptional state university in my area, Kent State, has 'mathematics and critical reasoning', not just 'mathematics', which can be filled with either Intro to Computer Science or Intro to Formal Logic. I know at least one person who went to a non-elite school that for some reason lumped in math and foreign languages, but I forget where and they're not on IM right now to check. So, from that perspective, it's not an 'elite college' thing at all on the math side, even if those universities have to be pickier about writing skills.
posted by Sequence at 4:29 PM on August 18, 2013

New College of Florida appears to have some programs with no specific course requirements. It does depend on area of concentration though. More info here.
posted by maximum sensing at 4:39 PM on August 18, 2013

> I shudder to think how no required English would go at state schools, just on the whole

I went to Evergreen, mentioned above, and it's a state school. I don't know why that would be worse than at private schools.

What I saw at Evergreen 20 years ago was that in their first year students wrote an essay on any topic, and people who couldn't write well did extra work on their writing. If their writing didn't improve they didn't get credit and possibly they were kicked out. I don't know if that was the official policy. I know one person who says he went to Evergreen for five years and graduated without ever writing a single paper, but that was unusual.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:53 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Not sure if you care about Canadian universities, but I went to Waterloo in the mid/late 00s and didn't take English. I did take a number of math courses because it was related to my major. I don't believe there was a math requirement for humanities majors, but there might have been a science one. We did have to pass an "English Language Proficiency Exam" which was basically writing an essay.
posted by quaking fajita at 5:04 PM on August 18, 2013

For what it is worth, you can graduate from Reed College without math credits, for now at least.
posted by Good Brain at 5:15 PM on August 18, 2013

Hampshire College requires things like "quantitative reasoning" and "writing skills" but doesn't require "English" or "Math." I don't think there are any core courses that everyone has to take.

I can confirm that there are no required courses at Hampshire. One simply has to take a variety of courses in their first year to satisfy the requirements. For instance, I was able to tick off "quantitative reasoning" by taking a course on trying to decipher bird song as language. I definitely took nothing resembling "English" or "Math" and graduated with a BA in liberal arts in 2008.
posted by 2ghouls at 5:19 PM on August 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Bennington College has no specific required classes. There is not even a requirement to take literacy or quantitative reasoning classes. All students have to "study broadly," but that's defined for each specific student by the student and faculty advisors.
posted by Betelgeuse at 5:42 PM on August 18, 2013

Wellesley College has distribution requirements (i.e. a certain number of credits from fine/applied arts, a certain number from social sciences, and a certain number from natural/physical sciences and/or mathematics) plus a requirement for a writing course (really broad range offered, however), so you could feasibly never take either English or Math and graduate without a problem.
posted by goggie at 5:52 PM on August 18, 2013

Amherst and Johns Hopkins are both schools which have no course requirements beyond that of your major. The key phrase you might want (in so far as dealing with U.S. schools at least) would be "open curriculum."

This isn't quite true for jhu. Students have a writing requirement (~12 credits I think), but more substantively, most (all?) departments impose their own distribution requirements. I'm on my phone so I can't check the details (and I don't know if some of this is school of arts & science imposed), but these requirements, plus the writing requirement, amount to a typical centralized distribution requirement in my dept at least. I wouldn't be too surprised to find similar decentralized but present requirements at many of the schools listed here.
posted by advil at 5:56 PM on August 18, 2013

Bryn Mawr follows a curriculum similar to that of Wellesley as described above. I graduated without taking a single math course by taking things like geology, computer science and a "physics for poets" type course. I took comp lit courses which I guess is "English" but could have taken other humanities classes instead to fulfill the undergrad requirements for a B.A. It was a wonderful education.
posted by rdnnyc at 6:56 PM on August 18, 2013

I got a BFA from a private school for undergrad and there was no math even offered, though writing classes were required. Then I went to grad school for architecture, where neither math OR English was required. I think that's pretty standard for architecture majors, which is a shame.
posted by ella wren at 7:44 PM on August 18, 2013

Johns Hopkins doesn't have GERs per se, but I believe there's a university-wide requirement for a certain number of credits designated writing intensive (possibly just in Arts and Sciences?) So not sure if it completely qualifies.
posted by charmcityblues at 8:26 PM on August 18, 2013

Aryma, people should be competent in writing and basic math when they graduate high school; they shouldn't have to go through all that again in college. I understand that many people in reality don't get that by high school graduation, but that's the idea. Elite colleges are less likely to "need" core requirements because their students are more advanced academically and/or had better high school educations.

Gen ed classes are one of a multitude of things I despise about so-called higher education. I believe college should be for job training: cut the rest of that shit out. I use business math an accounting at my job, but neither of those was required at college, only algebra, which I haven' t used once in the 20 years since I quit.
posted by Violet Hour at 10:42 PM on August 18, 2013

Do you mean required maths and English courses to gain acceptance onto the degree course, or to take the degree course?

Most universities in the UK have no 'required' courses across the board - some degrees ask for the entrant to have taken specific A-levels (in Medicine, it would be sciences, for my linguistics course, one had to either have an A-level in a foreign language or evidence of foreign language proficency outside the classroom such as growing up in a non-Anglophone household). Your A-levels are deemed sufficient proof of English ability - I think foreign students need to take some kind of proficiency test when applying to show that their language skills are up to following the course, but apart from that, no.

For maths-based subjects or English-based courses, you would almost certainly need to have taken the A-leven in the subject to apply, but not when it's irrelevant to the course. I stopped studying maths after my GCSEs when I was 16 and it made no difference at all in terms of applying for arts or social science subjects.

It's a different system here - not only do students concentrate on three to five subjects only between 16 and 18, but colleges and universities require application to study specific subjects rather than one deciding one's 'major' later - so it may not be useful for your example. The only courses I took as part of my degree were directly related to my degree, and the only requirements were specific modules within these. There was no requirement at all to take anything that was not a degree subject-related module.
posted by mippy at 2:50 AM on August 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

"What I saw at Evergreen 20 years ago was that in their first year students wrote an essay on any topic, and people who couldn't write well did extra work on their writing. If their writing didn't improve they didn't get credit and possibly they were kicked out. I don't know if that was the official policy. I know one person who says he went to Evergreen for five years and graduated without ever writing a single paper, but that was unusual."

I attended Evergreen in the class of 2010 and can confirm that this is no longer the case as there are zero absolute academic requirements for a BA degree beyond obtaining four years worth of credits and, now recently, writing at least one summative self evaluation of your performance to be printed with your transcript. The BS degree does require at least one year's worth of classes that qualify as advanced level science - but you get to pick all of them.

There are of course a variety of, often very rigorous, academic hurdles available; but they are all self imposed by design.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:58 AM on August 19, 2013

I think it might have just been the way things were done in the class that I took my first year. Students didn't get the full 16 credits if their writing was awful, and I don't remember if they gave partial credit. I'm probably misremembering that people would be kicked out for that, but maybe they were kicked out of the class.

(I tried to find my old class on the school's website but it looks like it isn't being taught now, at least not under its old name. One of my teachers from that class has been in the news lately, though...)

Anyway, we agree that Evergreen fits the "no required classes" question.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:37 AM on August 19, 2013

Here's a list of non-traditional college programs. The ones that immediately come to mind are Amherst, Brown, and Smith.
posted by melissasaurus at 10:07 AM on August 19, 2013

Wesleyan supposedly has no required classes (I think there are some offered freshman seminars though). Honestly I thought that was the college OP graduated from.
posted by obviousresistance at 10:44 AM on August 19, 2013

I think my class was one of the last to do Area-Sequence.

William & Mary now has GERs - as a transfer student cranky that Econ 101 from my previous school didn't transfer in as a quant reasoning class, I would say they're inflexible enough to disqualify W&M as an answer to this question.
posted by naoko at 7:18 PM on August 19, 2013

Swarthmore did not have any required classes when I attended in the early 2000's - rather we were required to take 3 courses in different departments within 3 distribution areas (natural sciences, social sciences and humanities). You definitely didn't have to take math or english, so long as you took courses in other departments that fell within the distribution areas. I took no english classes at all.
posted by annie o at 9:36 PM on August 22, 2013