WashU’s shared framework for undergraduate education focuses on shaping students as whole persons—in their academic knowledge and skills; their character and the integrative skills needed to transform the world; and in a grounded sense of personal purpose on where to apply their talents.  

See below to understand how three key commitments play into this shared model 

Commitment 1: Robust Foundations Across Disciplines

The innermost ring of the model reflects academic knowledge, skills, and abilities. To meet the needs of the modern world, WashU emphasizes three academic domains.  

  • The first foundation is communication dexterity, or helping students build effectiveness in communicating their ideas in written, spoken, visual, and digital media.  
  • The second academic foundation is quantitative and computational aptitude. To contribute to a world characterized by big data and artificial intelligence, students learn foundational quantitative and computational knowledge through their courses.  
  • The third domain is creativity and innovation; all centered on helping students formulate novel and useful insights and translate those insights into action.  

Commitment 2: Integrative Skills and Habits

The middle ring underscores WashU’s commitment to educating character and building the key set of integrative skills needed to have a transformative impact on society’s most pressing challenges. A WashU education focuses on building three key dispositions.

  • The first disposition is engaging across differences. Engaging across differences requires that students cultivate a value for differing perspectives and ideas, grow in their proclivity toward inquiry and curiosity about others, and develop a sense of humility about their own perspectives and ideas.  
  • The second disposition is toward being rooted civically and globally. By “rooted” we mean that students have a tendency to connect with their local civic community and a habit of inquiring about broader global systems.  
  • The final disposition is toward collaboration and leadership. Advancing transformative solutions to complex problems requires collective action. Students must develop a disposition to collaborate with and lead others, believing that anyone can energize and organize others toward collective goals.  

Commitment 3: A Centering on Purpose

The outer ring in our framework is the role of helping WashU students narrate a sense of purpose and opportunities for impact. Putting purpose at the center of students’ undergraduate experience enables them to develop this in an intentional way. Our model emphasizes developing a habit of regular self-reflection and engagement with individuals who see the world differently. Such a narrative process acknowledges that students likely come into their education with ideas about purpose, but that reflection and interaction with other students and faculty can and should change this over time. It is our honor to walk students through this process.