General Education
The backbone of your liberal arts degree
Spanning across your four years at Soka, General Education courses build the capacity to ask harder questions, reason across disciplines, and engage people whose experience is radically different from your own.
The course areas
Every SUA education begins here. Core is a two-course sequence — the first in the summer before your first semester at SUA begins, the second in the spring semester of your second year — that draws on texts from across cultures and centuries to ask the questions that have occupied human thought: What does a just society look like? What is the good life? What shapes global challenges like inequality, and how do we address them?
These aren't questions with simple answers. That's the point. With a cap of 12 students per section, Core is where you learn to read closely, argue carefully, and sit with difficulty — skills that carry through everything else you do at Soka.
Soka's student body is roughly half international. That means this course facilitates cross-cultural dialogue in ways that are not possible at most universities.
American Experience examines U.S. history, institutions, and culture — but some of the most significant learning happens in class discussions in which American students identify and question their assumptions, and international students bring perspectives that reframe what "the American experience" actually means. The course covers the Constitution, civil rights, immigration, race, gender, and the question of who gets included in the national story — and who doesn't.
For most of modern history, the Atlantic has been considered the center of global power. That's changing. The rise of East and Southeast Asia, the growth of Pacific economies, and the movement of people, capital, and culture across the ocean have made Pacific literacy essential for anyone engaging with today’s world.
This course surveys the history, politics, and cultures of the Pacific Basin — from colonialism and the Pacific War to contemporary trade, migration, and environmental interdependence. Faculty bring expertise on Latin America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, drawing in part from The Pacific Basin: An Introduction, a textbook written entirely by SUA faculty.
Every discipline has a different way of knowing. A historian and a biologist looking at the same question use entirely different tools to reach their conclusions. Modes of Inquiry makes those tools visible.
Taken in your second year, this course examines the major frameworks through which knowledge is produced: formal reasoning, empirical observation, historical analysis, philosophical inquiry, and interpretive methods. The goal is to understand when each is appropriate — and where each has limits. Along the way, students will hone their writing and communication skills by developing mastery of scholarly argument, while also building media literacy through hands-on engagement with the ways print, digital, and visual media shape how knowledge is framed and understood.
The Creative Arts Program offers hands-on studio courses in painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, photography, dance, and music — including composition, songwriting, and improvisation. No prior experience required. Beginners and advanced students work side by side in small classes, with the focus on the creative process itself: developing perception, taking risks, and learning what it means to bring something genuinely new into the world.
At its core, the program believes that engaging directly with art-making cultivates the empathy essential for global citizenship, and that developing the craft and creative thinking to realize imaginative ideas gives students the confidence to contribute fresh solutions in any field they pursue.
For students who want to go further, ensembles and advanced courses are available for elective credit, including performance opportunities in the Soka Performing Arts Center.
Every student takes three Science and Mathematics courses — one each in biological science, physical science, and mathematics — regardless of their concentration.
Courses range from Marine Biology to Earth's Cosmic Context and Symbolic Logic. Decode the genetics of antibiotic resistance, simulate countries' climate policy decisions, unravel the origins of the Big Bang, and learn to write Python to solve algorithmic problems — these courses are built around genuine discovery, asking students to wrestle with questions that matter right now.
The goal is scientific literacy: the ability to read evidence critically, understand how mathematical reasoning works, and engage with empirical questions as an informed citizen.
Every first-year student takes Writing 101, which teaches academic argument, research, and oral communication across the disciplines that make up a Soka education. Upper-level writing courses go deeper into specific modes: writing about race, the environment, film, the body, the archive, creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction.
The Writing Program runs on a Writing Across the Curriculum model. Writing isn't siloed into a single course. It's woven through the entire degree.
Explore the Writing Program
Every Soka undergraduate completes at least four courses in a language new to them. The four languages offered — Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish — were chosen deliberately: combined with English, they give students access to a substantial portion of the world's population.
Language study at Soka is preparation for your required third-year semester abroad. The Language and Culture Program works directly with the Study Abroad office, ensuring language learning builds toward the cultural flexibility to navigate unfamiliar contexts with confidence.
Upper-division courses in literature, visual arts, history, and media studies in the target language are available for students returning from abroad.
Wellness 100 is a two-credit required course taken in your first year. Grounded in personal assessment and reflection, it covers the physical, mental, social, and environmental dimensions of health. Topics include stress and sleep, mental health, physical activity, nutrition, reproductive health, and health behavior change.
It's part of Soka's commitment to developing the whole person, giving students the knowledge, self-awareness, and practical skills to care for themselves and build a life they feel good in.
Creativity Forum takes the creative process itself as its subject: how do new ideas actually happen?
This required course steps back from argument and analysis to examine how individuals and groups generate new thinking in any field. Faculty approach it from their own disciplines — music composition, psychology, literature, and many other subjects — each bringing a different set of frameworks for understanding and fostering creativity.
Offered during the 3.5-week Winter Block in January, Learning Clusters are intensive, 4-credit courses capped at 12 students that tackle a single real-world problem in depth. Faculty design courses around their own research interests and questions that don't fit neatly into a semester-long syllabus. Students have studied animal behavior at the L.A. and San Diego zoos, traced the politics of asylum in Miami, analyzed waste management on Soka's own campus, and examined Finland's education system firsthand in Helsinki.
Every student completes a Learning Cluster in their first and second years. Some complete a third in their junior year. Grants fund international travel each term, ensuring there are no additional costs to students. Past destinations include Japan, Ghana, Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Wales, and Argentina.
Ready to go deeper?
Explore the full undergraduate program — or talk to us about what a Soka education looks like for you.
More about Soka’s liberal arts education
Concentrations
Find what you love and apply yourself to it. Explore our concentrations and see how you can shape an industry.
Study Abroad
Use the skills you learned in the Language & Culture Program while seeing the world.
Pathways
SUA offers a couple of pathways, multidisciplinary sets of courses across the academic concentrations, within undergraduate studies.