Texas A&M Removes 200+ Gen-Ed Courses: EdTech Catalog Overhaul Ahead

For anyone selling into higher ed, a curriculum change of this scale is a data event first and a political story second. Degree-audit engines, SIS modules, transfer-articulation tables, and courseware catalogs across 11 Texas A&M campuses must now reconcile 360 removal entries — with the flagship alone dropping 103. SB 37 turns that one-time cleanup into a repeatable compliance loop: boards must keep auditing the core curriculum against a 'foundational and fundamental' test, which is exactly the kind of recurring workflow catalog-management and policy-tracking platforms are built to automate.

On September 3, 2026, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents voted to remove more than 200 classes from the general-education course lists that undergraduates at its 11 universities may use to satisfy graduation requirements, cutting LGBTQ literature, women's and gender studies, Latinx literature, race and ethnicity, climate change, and related offerings from the core curriculum. The board's agenda packet contains 360 catalog entries marked "remove," though the raw count overstates the number of distinct courses because some classes are cross-listed under multiple departments or appear in more than one general-education category.

The vote executes Senate Bill 37, a Texas law that requires public university governing boards to review the courses all undergraduates must take regardless of major and to confirm those courses are "foundational and fundamental" for a college education, prepare students for civic life and the workforce, and account for the tuition, fee, and time costs imposed on students. Regent Sam Torn framed the outcome as a housecleaning exercise, telling colleagues the universities "did a credible job in streamlining their various course listings of what most of us agreed could be described as somewhat bloated," while cautioning that "there is still much work to be done in the near future."

The burden of the cut falls unevenly across the system. Texas A&M University in College Station, the flagship, accounts for 103 removal entries — the largest share by far — followed by Texas A&M–San Antonio with 76, Tarleton State University with 48, and West Texas A&M and Texas A&M–Texarkana with 21 each; the six remaining campuses have between 13 and 18 entries apiece. Among the classes struck from the flagship's list are Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Literatures, Introduction to Latinx Literature Studies, Women Writers, Introduction to Race and Ethnicity, Gender and Health, and Blacks in the United States.

The practical consequence is a substantial re-plumbing of degree requirements across one of the largest public university systems in the country. Every removal changes the eligible course set that degree-audit systems, student information systems, transfer-articulation agreements, and advising platforms must encode. Courses removed from the gen-ed core do not disappear from departmental catalogs, but they lose the guaranteed enrollment pipeline that comes from satisfying a graduation requirement. That will depress demand in affected humanities, gender studies, ethnic studies, and climate-science departments and, by extension, for publishers, open educational resource providers, and courseware vendors whose content is licensed for those courses.