College of Arts and Sciences 2024-2025 Edition

The College of Arts and Sciences offers a diverse selection of academic programs that enable students to explore their individual intellectual interests while developing skills that lead to rewarding professional opportunities.

Undergraduate Degree Programs

The College of Arts and Sciences offers two degrees:

  • Bachelor of Science, with majors in Actuarial Mathematics, Applied Economics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Communication, and Digital Communication.
  • Bachelor of Arts, with majors in Arts and Creative Industries, History, Literary and Cultural Studies, Politics and Law, Sociology and Anthropology, and Spanish.

All Arts and Sciences students complete a business minor and may elect to take additional business courses.

Please refer to the minors' section of the catalog

Business minors

This fully integrated curriculum helps students understand and apply finance, management, and marketing principles, providing practical skills that complement a liberal arts education. Liberal arts students are challenged to expand critical thinking skills, take a global perspective, build intellectual capabilities, and enhance practical skills.

Mission

The faculty and students of the College of Arts and Sciences share the commitment to advancing the study and practice of the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and the natural and applied sciences. We fulfill our commitment through teaching, scholarship, creative work, and outreach. In faculty and student research, we generate new knowledge. In our teaching, publications, presentations to peers, and engagements with private and public organizations, we disseminate and share our knowledge.

  • The College provides a balanced education for every Bryant student in the core liberal arts areas of the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and both the natural and applied sciences.
  • The College creates and offers advanced programs – minors, concentrations, and majors – that reflect the interests of Bryant students as well as the complexity of the world into which they will graduate. The College stresses pedagogical approaches that provide students the opportunity to engage in exploration of the world, and to think clearly in contexts marked by uncertainty.
  • The College offers degree programs designed to prepare students for advanced study, as well as for application in meaningful ways.
  • The College fosters adherence to the highest standards of ethical conduct and personal responsibility.
  • The College fosters commitment to social responsibility. The faculty encourage academic excellence both by serving as role models in the best teacher/scholar tradition, and by sharing with students a commitment to diversity and an engagement in civic and professional service.
  • The College is committed to its faculty and students. The College expects and strongly supports excellence in teaching, service, scholarship, and creative work.

Learning Goals

The College of Arts and Sciences has defined the following areas of knowledge, skill building, and personal development as the framework of essential learning outcomes we ask our students to develop and demonstrate in the course of meeting their general education requirements.

  • Knowledge of human culture and traditions, creative activity, and the natural world as explained through the humanities, social sciences, and mathematical science
  • Facility with both written and oral communication
  • The skills of critical inquiry and creative problem solving
  • Quantitative literacy
  • Social responsibility, personal integrity, and civic engagement
  • Capability for ethical reasoning and action

Learning goals for individual programmatic majors, concentrations, and minors in the College of Arts and Sciences are set out within each program. 

The programs of study for degrees (except Actuarial Mathematics) require 122 credit hours of coursework. Completion of the Actuarial Mathematics program requires 124 credit hours of study. Typically, programs in the Bachelor of Arts degree program require 30 credit hours of coursework for completion of the major. Programs under the Bachelor of Science degree program typically require 36 hours of coursework in the major. The core and distribution requirements under the Bachelor of Science degree give greater emphasis to development of mathematical skills and research methodologies.

College of Arts and Sciences Departments and Degree Requirements

The curriculum requirements are designed to assist students in the development of their academic plan. The undergraduate curriculum comprises lower division and upper division courses, integrating liberal arts and business disciplines into a coherent academic program. Inherent in this design is the sequencing of courses that develops a core of foundation and introductory level courses. Thus, the freshman and sophomore years are focused on preparing students for more in-depth study in the upper division courses. In the junior and senior years, students take courses to fully develop their majors, concentrations and minors, as well as higher level business and liberal arts coursework.

Students work in concert with their advisors – professional academic advisors and departmental advisors – to plan their academic coursework and integrate course sequencing into the many facets of their overall educational plan.

The curriculum requirements for each major/concentration/minor are listed with their respective academic department.