General Education at AUB seeks to provide students with essential skills in research and communication, familiarity with significant modes of thought and broad exposure to fields of learning in a diversity of areas, cultural, societal, and scientific, so that they better learn to think critically and analyze intellectual and social issues in their historical and contemporary contexts from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and thereby, to enrich their lives by fostering problem solving skills and promoting life-long learning, in a program that embraces the principles of student choice and active learning.

A graduating AUB student should demonstrate competency in communication and exposition in English and (when relevant) Arabic and be able to approach, be able to access and critically select information in organized and sophisticated ways, think through, analyze, and explain problems and issues rationally from a variety of methods and perspectives.  The student should also attain an appreciation for the potential complexity of ideas and issues and a sense of how approaches to them change over time and may differ depending on historical period and cultural and/or social context.​