The general education component consists of 57 semester credit hours (54 hours for transfer students) spanning all four years. At the core of this component is a series of courses, several of them interdisciplinary, called Cultural Foundations.

In the freshman year, students reflect upon their identity and their relationship to the rest of society in Freshman Studies: The Human Experience. In this course, the entire freshman class meets together for a common lecture experience and then breaks into small groups (as part of their English writing requirement) to discuss and write about the subjects introduced in the lectures. Students complete a second writing course in their first year. In addition, College Mathematics, Computational Skills, and Oral Communication are recommended for freshmen.

In the sophomore year, students study American history and culture from two different perspectives. In The American Experience, they investigate American history from the viewpoint of racial and ethnic pluralism. In American Dilemmas, they employ the methods of economics, political science and other social sciences as they investigate the problems facing American society and as they formulate solutions to those problems. The sophomore year is an appropriate time to study the natural sciences, first in depth in a science of the student's choice and then in breadth in Science in Perspective.

In the junior year, students explore western civilization in The Identity of the West. They then investigate at least two contemporary cultures in separate modules of a course entitled Contemporary World Issues. These modules reflect the faculty's broad knowledge of a variety of cultures, ranging from the Far East to Western Europe to Latin America. Concurrent with these studies of cultures, students examine moral reasoning in a general ethics course or in an ethics course which is applied to their major area of study.

In addition to the courses already mentioned, each St. Edward's student is required to take at least six credit hours in a foreign language, three credit hours in philosophy and/or religious studies, and a minimum of one literature course and one course in the arts.

The general education curriculum culminates in the Capstone Course, taken after completion of 75 hours, in which students are required to investigate a controversial issue in society, analyze the different sides of that issue, propose a resolution to it, and communicate the results of the investigation both orally and in a major paper.