Schools with flexible (but not nonexistent) core requirements

Yurtle
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:36:18 +0000

Hamilton didn’t look completely open?..they had certain requirements they wanted people to meet.



“My personal definition of “flexible” core requirements is the ability to easily “sub-specialize” (second major, multiple minors) in fields unrelated to the first major.”



I just said it in the other thread, but I’ll leave it here for relevance too-

That sort of flexibility requires these numbers:

The average # of classes a student will take in four years.
The # of core classes.

So your first number should be:

The Average # of classes total - # of core classes.

Take this number. Look at the average # of classes required for a major. The avg # for a minor. Can you double major in the remaining classes? Major/minor?

EX:

Total AVG #: 32 classes in 4 years
Core #: 7

32-7 = 25 classes not part of the core.

If your major is going to take up 20 classes, it’s not really all that flexible. But 10? maybe more so. 15? What about minors? are they 6 classes or 8? Perhaps 5?

Ideally no matter what, you should be able to major/minor or double major in the remaining amount of classes. But even more ideally, you should be able to count some of the core towards a major or minor

Pitzer might be a decent option as distributional: http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/curriculum/guidelines.asp 6 core, plus writing. And some requirements that are really open/not necessarily strictly academic.