General Education Program
The General Education Program (GEP) at Saint Joseph’s University involves a distinctive liberal arts education in the Jesuit, Catholic tradition. General education is essential to the University’s mission, providing all students with the broad knowledge, essential skills, appreciation of diversity, and ethically informed perspective needed by those who would aspire to be “men and women for others.”
Course-level GEP learning objectives directly support the following six Student Learning Outcomes that are expected of all undergraduate students at SJU.
- Communication: Students will communicate effectively through written and oral modes of expression across academic, professional, and social contexts using appropriate technology.
- Critical Thinking and Inquiry: Students will think critically and construct reasoned arguments to support their positions using skills appropriate to the context, such as deductive reasoning, scientific inquiry, quantitative reasoning, aesthetic judgment, or critical examination of form, style, content, and meaning.
- Ethics, Social Justice, and Ignatian Values: Students will assess and respond to ethical and social justice issues informed by Ignatian values and other theoretical frameworks.
- Diversity: Students will engage respectfully, in a local and global context, with diverse human beliefs, abilities, experiences, identities, or cultures.
- Discipline or Program Specific Competencies: Students will acquire the essential knowledge and skills to succeed and make well-reasoned judgments personally, professionally, and in their chosen area(s) of study.
- Jesuit Intellectual Tradition: Students will examine forces that have shaped the world they have inherited through instruction in the Ignatian educational tradition which includes the study of the humanities, philosophy, theology, history, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences.
