The Woodrow Wilson School is a multidisciplinary major in which each student, in consultation with the director, creates an individual program of study that combines techniques of analysis from the social science disciplines and courses that give the student substantive depth in a particular policy area.

Concentrators must take a minimum of eight departmental courses to graduate. A departmental course is one that can be used to meet a WWS requirement. All courses used to meet requirements must be graded. Except for courses used to meet the ethics and the methods requirements, all courses must also be 300-level or above and be designated or cross-listed as ECO, HIS, POL, PSY, SOC or WWS in the semester in which they were taken; courses recognized by other departments as cognates but not listed this way cannot be used to meet requirements. Upper-level courses taken during a semester abroad may, with approval, be used to meet the disciplinary, distribution or ethics requirement.

The WWS course requirements are as follows:

Core Course Requirement: Concentrators and certificate students must take WWS 300, Democracy.

WWS Requirement: Concentrators and certificate students must take at least three WWS courses in addition to WWS 300. Task forces and policy conferences are not considered WWS courses, except that seniors serving as commissioners in task forces or policy conferences may use their work to satisfy one of their WWS course requirements.

Methods Requirement: By the end of their junior year, concentrators and certificate students must take one of the following courses: WWS 332, Advanced Quantitative Analysis for Public Policy; WWS 333 Claims and Evidence, ORF 245, Fundamentals of Engineering Statistics; MAT 310, Mathematical Statistics; ECO 312, Econometrics: A Mathematical Approach; ECO 313, Econometric Applications.

Ethics Requirement: Concentrators and certificate students must take one of the following courses: WWS 301, Ethics and Public Policy; CHV 310/PHI 385, Practical Ethics; PHI 202, Introduction to Moral Philosophy; PHI 309/CHV 309, Political Philosophy; PHI 319/CHV 319, Normative Ethics; POL 313, Global Justice, REL 261/ CHV 261 Christian Ethics and Modern Society; REL 363, Perspectives on Religious Ethics.

Disciplinary Requirement: Concentrators must take at least three courses in one of the following departments: Economics, History, Politics, Psychology or Sociology. Relevant cross-listed courses may be used to meet this requirement, (for example, AAS 391/SOC391 may be used as a Sociology course).

Distribution Requirement: Concentrators must take at least one course each in Economics, Politics, and History; and one course, total, in Sociology or Psychology. Certificate students must take at least one course in Economics, one in Politics, and one, total, in History, Sociology or Psychology. Relevant cross-listed courses may be used by concentrators or certificate students to meet this requirement.

NOTE: Courses used to meet one requirement may also be used to meet another, except that a course used to satisfy the methods requirement may not also be used to satisfy the economics requirement, and WWS 301/POL 308 may not be used to satisfy the Politics requirement.

WWS concentrators and certificate students must enroll in a WWS policy task force or policy conference each semester of their junior year. Concentrators receive credit for their junior independent work in the task forces and policy conferences; certificate students receive course credit.

Concentrators must do a senior thesis in WWS on a significant issue in public and international affairs. Certificate students may fulfill their WWS senior thesis requirement in the same way or by doing a thesis in their home department that has a substantial component concerned with public or international affairs.

WWS concentrators should take several courses that focus their course of study and provide substantive background for their eventual senior thesis topic, and should choose to take at least three courses in the primary discipline they plan to use in the analysis of their thesis topic.