General Education Curriculum

General education at The University of Scranton aims to generate opportunities for students to obtain and demonstrate broad knowledge of human cultures, social formations, and the physical and natural world. Moreover, philosophy and theology enjoy a special place in the Jesuit and Catholic educational traditions; in tandem with other disciplines, they encourage students to reflect on fundamental questions of ethics and faith in their personal and professional development. As such, the transformation for which The University of Scranton strives builds on shared, formative educational opportunities.

Students who take full advantage of the breadth of opportunities afforded to them by the general educational curriculum will develop a commitment to life-long learning and be practiced in the creative and compassionate imagination required to respond to the spiritual, intellectual, and material needs of others in a diverse and globalizing world. These include a range of courses that support the acquisition of intellectual and practical skills for formal and informal communication (oral and written) and for the critical and innovative thinking that guides inquiry and analysis.  Foundational learning is often described as skills, but no skill can be taught or learned in isolation from content or processes. To that end, the general education program is designed to achieve the goals articulated below by engaging students in fundamental areas of technological and information literacy, diversity, humanities, natural sciences, philosophy, quantitative reasoning, social-behavioral sciences, and theology.

The general education curriculum is composed of required and elective courses that are intended to lead students to these goals.  The curriculum also includes opportunity to develop both depth and breadth in the major, the cognate, and in the areas of natural science, social/behavioral science, humanities, philosophy, and theology. Within the disciplines listed above, students will also take at least two courses that are writing intensive and two courses with a strong cultural diversity component.

Courses that fulfill general education requirements as described in the outline below can be identified in the catalog and course bulletin listings by a letter code in parentheses preceding the course title:

Courses having more than one letter code indicates that the course satisfies multiple general education requirements; e.g., (CH,W) satisfies both a Humanities/Culture: History and a Writing-Intensive requirement.