Colleges and universities may change their general education requirements. They may also create or demolish ethics centers.
If you notice that our map reflects outdated or inaccurate information regarding your institution, please let us know after reading how we coded below. Email updates to nep@appe-ethics.org.
General Education Requirements
We count a university or college as requiring students to take an ethics course as part of their general education if it satisfies one or more of the following criteria:
- The university or college requires all undergraduate students to take a course with a prefix of either “ethic-” (e.g., a course titled “Ethical Issues in Contemporary Society”) or “moral-” (e.g., a class named “Moral Leadership”).
- The course catalog (or its equivalent material) lists the cultivation of ethical capacity as a required learning goal or a key area of their general education curriculum.
To code each university and college, we took the following steps:
- Find the latest course catalog or website that describes the institution’s undergraduate general education (or equivalent) curriculum.
- See if the university lists the cultivation of ethical capacity, expressed with a prefix of either “ethic-” or “moral-,” as one of their key learning goals.
- If the answer is yes, count the institution as requiring students to take ethics courses as a part of their undergraduate general education.
- If the answer is no, find the list of courses students are required to take to fulfill their generation education curriculum.
- If the list demonstrates that all undergraduate students must take at least one course with a prefix “ethic-” or “moral-,” count the institution as requiring students to take ethics courses as a part of their undergraduate general education.
- If undergraduate students are not required to take ethics courses but have the option to take one to fulfill their generation education requirements, we count the university or college as offering ethics electives for their general education curriculum.
Ethics Centers
We counted a university or college as having an ethics center if it satisfies one of the following criteria: 1. The institution has a center named with a prefix “ethic-” or “moral-”; or 2. The institution has a center, and its website clearly describes engagement in ethics (e.g., The Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado Boulder).
Important Notes on our Map Data:
- We do not consider general education requirements for transfer students or students pursuing associate degrees.
- We understand that some courses or key learning areas are clearly related to ethics without being worded with prefixes, such as “ethic-” and “moral-.” For instance, it is possible to reasonably infer that courses such as Democracy and Legitimacy cover topics related to ethics. Making rooms for these implicit ethics courses, however, invites ambiguity and lack of consistency in coding. For this reason, we opted out of counting these implicitly termed ethics courses at the moment.
- Please note, however, that we have also coded some of these implicit ethics courses using our developed tools to identify ethics courses that do not come with certain prefixes and published a paper about it.