Note
Requirement rates on this page use only included undergraduate programs with collection_depth == "course_coded". Programs with partial or existence-only collection remain in the derived file, but they are not counted as requiring zero non-economics content.
This page describes the required non-economics side of the curriculum: politics and government, constitutional or founding materials, civic dialogue, community engagement, law and rights, philosophy and ethics, public policy and leadership, methods, language/international content, and capstone or applied work. Topic labels are project-coded from requirement rows, so they describe what the curriculum requires rather than how the institution markets the program.
Snapshot
324
Course-coded programs
6
Median required non-econ rows
61%
Intro politics / gov
19%
Constitutional / founding
19%
Community engagement
11%
Great books / texts
Undergraduate DESK Profile
The DESK comparison below uses the canonical UG JSON assessment table. The UG universe includes confirmed undergraduate credentials and pathways; the figure reports the number with complete approved DESK coding over the eligible total for each category. A capacity is counted only when official-source evidence supports it. A pending or uncertain assessment is not a substantive zero.
DESK capacity definitions. These are the same broad labels used on the ecosystem page, but here they are applied to undergraduate program records.
- Knowledge: structured academic instruction in civic or political knowledge, including curricular work on political theory, constitutionalism, public institutions, law, civic ideals, or self-government.
- Skill: practical civic capacity-building, including dialogue, civil discourse, facilitation, organizing, public communication, leadership, policy analysis, research methods, or related civic competencies.
- Disposition: civic, moral, ethical, religious, or character formation, including language about virtue, responsibility, judgment, civic identity, or how students ought to live and act as citizens.
- Experience: direct participation in civic, political, communal, or public-facing settings, including service, community engagement, internships, fellowships, mentoring, volunteering, public-interest work, or applied civic projects.
Common Building Blocks
This chart shows which non-economics topic families appear as required curricular content by program category. Each bar is the share of course-coded programs in that category with at least one required row in the topic family, not the number of credits or the intensity of the requirement.
The largest commonalities are not all civic in the same way. Many programs require basic politics/government or philosophy/ethics, while civic thought programs split across constitutional, great-books, community-engaged, policy, and dialogic designs. Community engagement is therefore treated below as a practice-oriented design family rather than as a vertex in the civic-humanities ternary.
Basic Politics/Government Requirements
Diversity Of Curricular Designs
The heatmap below groups programs by broad category or civic subtype and shows how often each required topic family appears. Rows with fewer than five course-coded programs are suppressed so that single unusual programs do not look like stable design patterns.
The bundle chart counts co-occurring requirements. It is a quick way to see which curricular combinations travel together, but it does not distinguish between a light one-course signal and a deeper sequence.
Civic Orientation Ternary
The ternary plot focuses on civic thought/leadership programs and compares the relative balance of philosophy/ethics, great books/core texts, and constitutional/founding content. Community engagement and dialogue signals are shown as separate annotations because they often function as practice-oriented design choices rather than as one of the three text/curriculum vertices.
| Civic subtype | Dialogue / new civics signal | Programs |
|---|---|---|
| Constitutional / founding | No | 25 |
| Great books / civic humanities | No | 24 |
| Community engagement / social change | No | 10 |
| Other civic thought | No | 7 |
| Public policy / civic leadership | No | 7 |
| Great books / civic humanities | Yes | 6 |
| Constitutional / founding | Yes | 3 |
| Community engagement / social change | Yes | 2 |
| Civic studies / dialogue | Yes | 1 |
| Law, ethics, and rights | No | 1 |
| Public policy / civic leadership | Yes | 1 |