UChicago Class Of 2016 Discussion

coocoocachoo
Sun, 21 Aug 2011 19:37:27 +0000

JHS did what I thought was a very good job exploring the differences between the Columbia and UChicago Core curricula in another thread.



JHS:

Chicago and Columbia used to have very similar Cores, but Chicago shook its Core up about a decade ago. At Columbia, everyone in the College (i.e., not the engineering students) takes the same 5 courses (two of which are year-long) plus a writing course at some point during their first two years – about half of their overall course load. Those are broad, interdisciplinary classes that give everyone a common base of knowledge in mainstream Western culture, including the humanities, political philosophy, and the history of science. Then, on top of that, there are some distributional requirements (but not as many as at colleges that only have distributional requirements).

Chicago has more of a Chinese-menu approach, but everyone has to take a year of a special broad Social Science course and two years total of a special Humanities course, interdisciplinary Civilization courses (history/area studies), and arts, plus meeting semi-distributional requirements in math, physical science, biology, and language. Students can choose among 5-6 different courses for “Sosc” and “Hum”, but there is a fair amount of overlap between the choices. Compared to Columbia, the Chicago Core syllabi are a little less mainstream, more idiosyncratic – everyone at Chicago winds up reading Walter Benjamin and Emile Durkheim, names that I don’t think show up on the Columbia syllabus, in addition to stuff that does like Genesis, the Iliad, Dante, Plato, and Marx.

The Chicago and Columbia Cores both require 30-40% of a student’s courses to complete, and ensure that all undergraduates share a common base of reference (a little more so at Columbia). Contrast that with St. John’s, where everyone is basically in lockstep for three years, and the study of math begins with Euclid. (No one reads Euclid at Chicago or Columbia.)