Academics

The Residential College is a liberal arts program inside the College of LSA, built around one idea: that the most interesting learning happens when you combine disciplines rather than stay inside one. Classes are small, faculty know you by name, and you are encouraged to explore widely and shape a path that is your own.

Whether you are an LSA student thinking about taking RC courses or declaring a major, or you are still deciding where to spend your undergraduate years, this is where you can see how an RC education actually works: what you study, how you progress, and where it leads.

Start here

If you are new to the RC, begin with our Mission & Values to understand how an RC education is structured.

What Can You Do With an RC Degree?

An RC degree is an LSA degree. Whatever a Michigan graduate can go on to do, you can too, because you're an LSA student the whole way through. The question worth asking is what you'll actually be good at when you get there.

Look at what the jobs themselves ask for.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook, which spells out what real careers require, lists the same qualities over and over for the professional roles a graduate might want: analytical skills, communication, critical thinking, problem-solving. Project managers, research analysts, economists, and plenty of others come down to the same thing. Make sense of a pile of information, then explain it clearly to someone who wasn't in the room.

That's what the RC trains, day to day, without ever calling it career prep.

Your classes are small and built on discussion, so you learn to make an argument and hold it up when someone pushes back.
RC writing isn't one-and-done essays. You draft it, rewrite it, then have to defend it out loud to a room, which is communication in the form an interviewer can actually see.
Knowledge of a second language, used at lunch tables and coffee hours with people whose background isn't yours, widens where you can live and work.
And in a college where you live, study, and make things next to the same people, collaboration stops being a word on a resume and becomes second nature.

The government projects most new jobs between 2024 and 2034 in professional, scientific, and technical services and in healthcare, fields that run on exactly this kind of thinking. The RC also builds real experience into the degree through community projects, internships, and a term abroad, so you graduate with something concrete to show.

The RC won't teach you to code, and it doesn't pretend to. It gives you the human half. Because you're an LSA student, you can add a statistics or computer science course and walk out with both the technical skill and the judgment to use it, which is the pairing employers are short on.

Where it lands depends on your path.

Major in the RC and you go deep in one interdisciplinary field.
Take an RC minor and it sits beside a major from anywhere in LSA.
Major elsewhere entirely and the RC still stays on your degree as the place that taught you to write, think across subjects, and work in another language.