The Core Curriculum is the cornerstone as well as the intellectual signature of a Columbia education.  Students and alumni repeatedly point to the Core as not only academically formative, but as personally transformative.  For many students, the most meaningful classroom experience at Columbia-the insight about themselves that changes their perspective on life, or the breakthrough understanding about society that determines their choice of career-happens in the close-knit environment of the Core classroom. Students in the Core encounter texts, ideas, and works of art that have deeply influenced the world in which we live, and that continue to shape how we think about ourselves and our society.  

The Core classroom thrives on the most difficult questions in the human experience: what does it mean to be an individual?  How does one live with the certainty of death?  What kind of life is most worth living?  What responsibilities does membership in community entail?  How do we evaluate and judge the impact of humans on the environment?  For nearly 90 years, a Columbia education has meant an intellectually rigorous encounter with this category of questions: not ultimately to arrive at answers, but to develop the capacity to think about them more consciously and more productively.   

Like generations of Columbians, students today develop through the Core Curriculum critical tools of observation, evaluation, and judgment that translate into all spheres of life.  In completing the Core, they join an intellectual community that includes Columbia graduates in different places, different careers, and different generations.  While many of the specific arguments encountered in the Core will be forgotten, and the poignancy of many of the works of art will fade out of focus, the enduring habits of mind developed in the Core will leave an indelible mark in the capacity to experience one's own life in a richer and more meaningful way.