KU’s new Core Curriculum, as it will be presented to freshmen starting in the fall, is taking its final form right now. It will apply to all undergraduates, but KU’s individual schools also are figuring out what kinds of general-education requirements they might like to have above and beyond the roughly 36 credit hours’ worth that will be in the Core.

That includes KU’s biggest school, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Faculty and some student representatives in the College will be voting soon to establish requirements for its biggest degree track, the Bachelor of Arts. That’s according to a letter distributed last month by Danny Anderson, the dean of the CLAS. He also included some proposed requirements from a committee.

Students seeking a BA currently have 72 credit hours’ worth of general-education requirements. That’s well more than half of the 120 hours required for a bachelor’s degree, and a figure commonly cited by KU leaders as way out of line with other universities.

The proposed new requirements for the BA would require a maximum of 56 credit hours’ worth of gen-ed courses, but most students wouldn’t actually need to take that many (more on that below). It would include three additional requirements beyond those that will apply to all undergrads, as Anderson suggested when he told me late last year that the College would still be giving students a well-rounded liberal arts education.

Those extra requirements include an extra “quantitative” course beyond the one required by the Core; four semesters’ worth of proficiency in a foreign language; and a laboratory or field experience, such as a laboratory science course, that will give students experience doing scientific work. Those all echo similar existing requirements for the BA.

Students probably won’t have to take all 56 hours, according to the proposal, because they may use transfer or Advanced Placement credits, use some courses to fill more than one requirement, test out of some foreign language courses if they took some classes in high school, etc.

As you may note, those proposed requirements do not include the Western Civilization sequence currently required for a BA from the College. We reported a while back that Western Civ would likely no longer be universally required.

The College will likely vote on those new requirements sometime in the next week, CLAS communications director Kristi Henderson told me.

You can count on Heard on the Hill to continue to provide a well-rounded education on all things KU for you. But it will be even more well-rounded if you send a KU news tip right now to merickson@ljworld.com .