In debates over higher education, few topics induce more passionate arguments than the core curriculum. Is it an artifact of a bygone era, or an indispensable foundation for the future? As universities dilute requirements, scatter learning across buffet-style electives, and increasingly prioritize technical or niche-job skills, we risk abandoning an educational tradition that has helped sustain American innovation and self-government. A strong, focused core curriculum, rooted in the classical liberal arts, remains not only relevant but essential for cultivating adaptable, ethical, and creative leaders capable of navigating a complex economy.

A Potent Marriage: Thinking and Doing

A 2015 report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that only 26% of surveyed employers considered recent graduates well prepared in critical thinking, and only 23% considered them well prepared to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.

Derek Bok, in Higher Education in America, documents the same gap from inside the academy: undergraduates are not learning as much as their institutions claim. Bok and I would part ways on the remedy; he is skeptical of prescription, but we agree on the diagnosis.

In a job-driven culture, it is easy to assume specialized training is the shortest path to success. History suggests otherwise. Steve Jobs attributed much of Apple’s innovation not to narrow technical skill but to the fusion of technology with the liberal arts. A calligraphy course at Reed College transformed his understanding of design and eventually shaped the Macintosh’s groundbreaking interface. “It is technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing,” Jobs said at the launch of the iPad 2. Notably, he took that course after leaving the degree program; he wanted the material, not the credential. A coherent core makes encounters beyond a student’s chosen field a deliberate part of every education.

The Lasting Value of Broad Learning

Research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce documents substantial differences in earnings by major. Immediate salary, however, cannot capture the full value of an education. The capacities a coherent core should develop—judgment, clear communication, and the ability to master unfamiliar material—have value throughout a working life.

Practitioners say as much. Jean-Pierre Garnier, former chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, urged young professionals to read widely, not only in their professional domain but in literature, philosophy, and the arts, to cultivate perspective and adaptability. Philanthropists have noticed, too. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s 2022 Annual Report describes a constellation of donors pouring resources into classical academies and charter schools, many unapologetically core-centric, on the conviction that the ability to reason, communicate, and engage foundational knowledge is the real fuel for innovation.

The liberal arts have practical value because their purposes extend beyond preparation for a particular job. They cultivate capacities that students can carry from one occupation to another and from one civic responsibility to another.

Rigorous Cores Foster Real Skills and Real Civic Life

The trivium– grammar, logic, and rhetoric- endures in classical models not as an antiquarian relic but as a sequence that teaches students how to learn rather than what to think. Coherence requires more than a checklist of unrelated courses. Students should repeatedly practice writing, reasoning, and evaluating evidence across subjects, with expectations that build as their education advances.

A shared foundation also does civic work. When graduates hold common reference points in history, mathematics, literature, and culture, they possess something increasingly scarce: the capacity to argue productively with people who disagree with them. Commerce and self-government both run on the common ground that a core supplies.

Against the Elective Buffet

Critics of required cores claim they stifle intellectual freedom and serendipity. But as Michael Poliakoff argues, serendipity requires preparation: a student recognizes an unexpected opportunity only when he has the foundation to see it for what it is. The eighteen-year-old assembling a schedule from a thousand options is not exercising freedom so much as absorbing the consequences of institutional indecision.

The honest caution runs the other direction. A streamlined core must mean a reaffirmation of rigor and intellectual coherence, not a quiet exclusion of uncomfortable truths. A core worth requiring includes the texts that unsettle us.

Much of the inertia against reform is structural. Curricular authority is dispersed across so many committees that no one owns the outcome, and a proposal must survive a dozen vetoes to become a requirement. The result is not thoughtful conservation of what is timeless — it is paralysis in the face of what is plainly broken.

Our economy and our constitutional republic depend on graduates who can think deeply, reason ethically, and communicate effectively. If we are to remain a nation of enterprise and self-government, we must resist educational drift, realign priorities, and restore the core as the backbone of higher learning.

Required courses alone do not establish educational quality. Universities must examine students’ writing, reasoning, and use of evidence to determine whether the core delivers what it promises.

Universities should take responsibility for what every graduate knows and can do. A coherent core makes that responsibility visible: to students, employers, and the public.

Walter V. Wendler, Professor of the Practice–Higher Education Reform, Bush School of Government and Public Service; President Emeritus, West Texas A&M University; Chancellor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Weekly columns available at walterwendler.com.