A Survey of Core Curricula at Catholic Universities

Here is a link to the full report described below: http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/core/catholic_core_report.pdf

This survey is meant to be a basic reference. We have not captured all of the details of each core, and encourage you to use the included links to explore further. Our hope is that these examples can suggest some of the options availabe to USD, as it seeks to design a Catholic-inflected core curriculum.
Method

• Unless otherwise noted these are 3-unit, semester courses.
• For consistency, with each curriculum we count the maximum number of
  language courses.
  
• Many core requirements can be double counted, like USD’s D courses. These are
  identified with an asterisk, and for consistency they are not counted in the total
  core size tally.
  
• Some schools have slightly different core requirements for business or
  engineering schools. Reported here are requirements for colleges of liberal arts.
  
• All information is taken from university websites. 
  
   Vocabulary

• “Distribution by category”: a standard distribution structure, but not by department. In some places the categories are the familiar units, “social science,” “humanities,” etc. and in other places they are thematic, such as “Critical Thinking” or “Engaging the World”
  
• “Required Core Course”: a course with a relatively universal syllabus, required for all students, such as Columbia’s well known Literature Humanities course.
  
• “LLC”: Living Learning Community, such as USD is currently developing
  
• See the Core Action Plan glossary for further descriptions of types of core
  curricula
  
  Compiled by Abe Stoll and Lance Nelson