The Common Core consists of twenty courses in a particular sequence. Students are required to take the first ten of these courses during the freshman year. During their sophomore and junior years, students take four more courses during each of those years. The two final Common Core courses occur in the senior year. Altogether, the Common Core accounts for half the courses a student needs to graduate from King’s.

Why this extraordinary number of required courses? The King’s College was created to prepare students for a particular kind of religious, cultural, political, and economic leadership. We believe that students who aspire to change the key institutions of society for the better need to know the best ideas, the most important arguments, and the most influential traditions. We also believe that such students need to achieve excellence in the written and the spoken word. The Common Core is a classical answer to these challenges: it recognizes that some subjects are more fundamental than others; that subjects are best learned in a specific sequence; and that truly advanced courses must be built on secure foundations.