ABSTRACT
In answering the question, “What is the core curriculum?” the institution and the faculty must be able to say what they find most important about planning and what planners must know. For each individual program, decisions about the core will be informed by participants’ considerations of the tensions between design and policy, theory and practice, and generalist versus specialist knowledge, as well as the school’s disciplinary mix, the training of its faculty, and the input of its employers and alumni. This chapter covers the main issues in designing a core curriculum, including the most common elements of (and differences between) core curriculum designs, before considering how the future of planning will affect the core curriculum and how decisions about core curricula will affect planning.
