University of Illinois At Chicago

General Education is an important part of every undergraduate degree program. The General Education Program provides students with a breadth of exposure to the academic disciplines and serves as the foundation for the knowledge, skills, and competencies essential to becoming well-educated college graduates and citizens.

The program ensures a certain level of intellectual breadth, while at the same time allowing students the opportunity to select courses or clusters of courses around areas of their own interests. Specifically, the program:

• provides intellectual guidance by identifying six broad areas of knowledge that correspond to the kinds of experiences that a liberally educated person should have.
• makes clear to students what they are taking and why.
• is an open system that does not bind departments into one category. This model thus allows for the development of interdepartmental courses over time. It also allows students to gain interdisciplinary perspectives, which was one of the hoped for outcomes of revising General Education.
• gives individual colleges some freedom to adjust the General Education requirements to suit their own needs. Although there is a campus wide minimum of one course from each General Education category, colleges may add additional course requirements.