The college courses in which students earned the most credits have remained relatively stable over the past three decades.

The list of the top 30 postsecondary courses—also referred to by Adelman (forthcoming) as the “empirical core curriculum”—reports the subjects that students study the most in college, as opposed to reporting what they “should” study, which might be expressed through graduation requirements or faculty surveys. Using the undergraduate transcripts of students from three high school cohorts who later completed bachelor’s degrees, Adelman identified the 30 courses in which students earned the most credits and examined the extent to which course-taking varied among the three groups.¹ Among bachelor’s degree recipients who graduated from high school in 1972, 1982, and 1992, each cohort earned about one-third of their credits from the top 30 postsecondary courses for the cohort (see table 30-1).

The empirical core curriculum has remained largely stable over the past three decades: 21 courses appeared in the top 30 for each cohort. Six courses each from the humanities and languages, science and mathematics, and social sciences and business were in the top 30 for all three cohorts, as were music performance, physical education activities, and student teaching. There were some changes over time however. For example, the number of business courses in the top 30 list increased from four for the 1972 cohort to six for the 1982 cohort and then decreased again to four courses for the 1992 cohort.

The empirical core curriculum varied for graduates of “highly selective,” “selective,” and “nonselective” institutions. For the cohort of bachelor’s degree recipients who graduated from high school in 1992, 12 courses appeared on the top 30 lists for all three types of institutions (see table 30-2). The top 30 list for highly selective institutions included a concentration of engineering and humanities and courses with an international theme (e.g., international relations and non-Western religion). Business courses were relatively common in the lists for selective and nonselective institutions, and student teaching and physical education were on the top 30 list only among nonselective institutions. These differences in coursetaking by the selectivity of institutions may reflect variations in the degrees that are offered and granted at these institutions.

¹To identify the top 30 courses, Adelman calculated “credit ratios” by summing all the credits earned in a course by each cohort and dividing that sum by the total number of credits earned by the cohort across all courses. Although courses may have different titles across institutions, “introduction to accounting,” for example, represents all introductory accounting courses. See supplemental note 6 for more information about the data sets used for these analyses, including the definitions of courses and of “highly selective,” “selective,” and “nonselective” institutions. (back to text)