Students entering Washington and Lee University as early as fall 2026 will be subject to a new general education system which will completely change the way that students move through the liberal arts curriculum.

The new curriculum will be a minimum of 32 credits, all of which must be taken during students’ four years at Washington and Lee, said Professor Lloyd Tanlu, a co-chair of the General Education Implementation Committee. That means classes as soon as Washington and Lee’s Class of 2030 won’t be able to transfer in AP or IB credits for their Foundation and Distribution Requirements (FDRs). The changes will likely go into effect in the Class of 2030’s first year but could be delayed until fall 2027 if they are not approved in time, Tanlu said. 

Students already studying at W&L at the time of the change will keep their FDRs, but incoming first-years will have a brand new pathway through their liberal arts education. Students can still transfer in AP credits towards their 120 for graduation, but they won’t count for Gen Ed requirements, said Paige Gance, a member of the General Education Implementation Committee.

Instead of the subject-based requirements W&L students know today, future students will undergo a skills-based curriculum. The Gen Ed curriculum will require 13 classes from different “modes of inquiry,” each honing a different student skill: Creative Making, Ethical Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Humanistic Inquiry and Analysis, Social Scientific Inquiry and Analysis, Scientific Inquiry and Analysis, Intercultural Communication, Physical Education and Wellness, and Writing-intensive first year seminar.

In addition, students must complete a “pathway” that represents an interdisciplinary issue, take a “worldview engagement” course, and complete a “signature experience” like a capstone, thesis or final project, Tanlu said.

Some of those requirements won’t be so foreign to W&L students. The Scientific, Humanistic, and Social Scientific Inquiry and Analysis buckets won’t be so different from the science lab (SL), humanities (HU) and social science (SS) FDRs that students currently have, Tanlu said. The quantitative reasoning class will likely resemble the current math requirement, although there will likely be additions and changes to the courses that meet those requirements in the fall.

Other classes, though, will look quite different.

WRIT 100 will be a thing of the past. Instead, students will take a first-year writing seminar from any variety of disciplines, Tanlu said. The first-year seminar will be the first of three writing-intensive courses required for graduation.

The language requirement, listed as “Intercultural Communication,” will now be a consistent two-semester requirement, Tanlu said. It will replace the current proficiency requirement, which ranges from zero to four semesters. All students, regardless of their language abilities when entering W&L, will be required to take two semesters of language coursework.

“It’s a compromise,” said Russian professor Yulia Rubina. “The Russian language is a hard language […] one year is not even enough to learn basic grammar.”

But Rubina said that, on the other hand, one year of language education may help students see if they want to continue learning a language.

“[Maybe] you have to take the first year of a language, but actually it’s not about really studying that language, it’s just about trying it,” Rubina said. “If this is the purpose of the language requirement, that’s okay.”

Students will still be required to take three typical Physical Education courses, but the fourth one-credit class can be either a traditional PE or a wellness class. Tanlu said that wellness classes will have more freedom, ranging from sports psychology to dance.

Some of the “modes of inquiry” will be brand new to W&L’s general education curriculum.

The ethical reasoning class will challenge students to ponder difficult moral questions. But it doesn’t have to be a philosophy course, Tanlu said. Ethics classes are already offered in the journalism, business, environmental studies and strategic communication curricula, for example.

A creative making class will resemble the arts (HA) requirement, but it instead stresses that students build something new. Some Art History classes might not count for this FDR credit any longer. Instead, Tanlu said, students will have to take something with a creative element, like a studio art class.

That nine-part distribution model will be supplemented by what Tanlu called a strand-oriented model later in the student experience. It’s designed to integrate a liberal arts education through all four years of the student experience.

The strands will include an interdisciplinary “pathway,” where students take three courses across three different disciplines with a common underlying topic. For example, Tanlu said, a student could take a course on the philosophy of AI, a machine learning computer science course, and an AI accounting course.

Students will also take a “perspective seminar” in their second or third year, Tanlu said. Implementation and details about the sophomore seminar are still under review. Also still in the works is a required “signature experience” from a community-based learning class, thesis, capstone, performance, or some other big project.

Tanlu said this is a change of an FDR system that has relics dating back to the 1980s. The changes resolve what Tanlu called an equity problem.

“Students who don’t have access to these AP programs or whatever end up taking up to 52 [credits],” Tanlu said. “So it goes up as high as 52 and there’s some people who go less than 30, 20-something [credits] just because they all test out of all of these APs.”

Courtney May, ’26, transferred 28 credits into Washington and Lee from AP classes she took in high school, she said. She checked off politics, Spanish, history and entry-level math credits with AP classes.

May is now on a pre-med track with Bachelor’s of Science degrees in Biochemistry and Mathematics. While she said she supports the new FDR changes, she thinks the new model will make it hard to complete two B.S. degrees.

“If you really wanted to still double major, you could definitely do that,” May said. But “you might have to overload for a couple semesters.”

The new general education system has been in the works since 2018, Tanlu said. W&L’s General Education Review Committee first evaluated the existing system. A new group, the General Education Development Committee, built the structure for the new gen ed system. In 2022, the General Education Implementation Committee was born.

The General Education Development Committee created “sort of a skeleton of what we were going to do,” Tanlu said, “and now the implementation committee is filling in the meat over the bones.”

The planning work is far from over –– once the Gen Ed curriculum is finalized, another faculty committee will be responsible for tailoring class syllabi to meet the new requirements, a process expected to span through the 2025-26 school year.

“Next year is going to be the nuts and bolts of getting courses labeled as any of these things,” Tanlu said, “and hopefully by 2026 we’ll have enough of those courses that people can actually start taking them.”