The University of Texas at Austin has announced a new core curriculum revamp — the first of its kind in some 20 years.
This change came in response to lawmakers passing legislation to streamline requirements for graduation and end what critics have called a grab-bag list of pop culture or narrow courses that can qualify students to get their diplomas.
But some fear this refocus will reduce course diversity and ultimately result in the elimination of smaller programs like ethnic or gender studies.
Lily Kepner, who covers higher education for the Austin American-Statesman, said unlike other universities that have made smaller changes, UT overhauled the core curriculum entirely.
“Under the new proposal, UT students would have to take 36 credits across three pillars: Arts and Humanities, which is the bulkiest at 15 credits, Social Sciences at nine credits, and STEM at 12 credits,” Kepner said. “This wouldn’t go into effect until at the earliest fall 2028, but that’s pending approval from the Higher Education Coordinating Board.”
The new requirements are more humanities-heavy than the old ones, Kepner said, and the changes are more prescriptive of what students will learn.
“Instead of saying students have to have a competency in writing or in intellectual reasoning or in cultural diversity, it’s saying students have to take a course in Western civilization, in masterworks of literature, in great questions of human life,” she said. “Those have very specific standards for what can meet them. So, students will likely have a much smaller list of courses to choose from, and the system is based off of content, not skills that students should learn.”
This revamp stemmed from Senate Bill 37, a higher education reform bill that the Legislature passed in 2025. They charged universities with really looking at their core curriculum offerings and making sure they were foundational and relevant to the workforce and to civic life.
However, Kepner said other Texas universities have approached complying with this law in different ways.
“Many have trimmed the amount of courses that can count (toward core curriculum). Texas Tech University and Texas A&M University systems have limited how classes in race and gender can count towards the core curriculum,” she said. “There’s really changes across the board, but UT notably didn’t say that anything specifically can’t count. They just have much higher standards for what can.”
UT appointed a faculty committee to advise on the changes, and Kepner said they looked at national models for traditional civic education like Columbia University and Purdue University.
“They really proposed that the University of Texas should be the first university of that scale to do this for a large amount of students,” Kepner said. “UT serves many more students than Columbia University, and that makes the implementation of something like this that requires Western civilization courses for 10,000 students a year much more difficult. However, the university president said that the university is up to the challenge.”
Kepner said some faculty have raised concerns that this curriculum revamp represents conservative politics interfering with higher education.
“I’m definitely hearing that critique from faculty who are concerned about the university taking a more political direction or making changes because of politicians desires and not because of students and faculty,” she said. “I will say, however, that UT really gave faculty a lot of control over looking at the core and suggesting improvements and made sure that student government was involved in these and it seemed like everyone involved in that decision was pretty unanimous in that there had to be changes to make sure that the core was valuable to students.”