For admission to the program, a B.A. is required from all applicants (but no GRE scores).
Course work consists of 15 credit-hours (i.e., five courses) at graduate level (based on a list of approved courses of all participating schools and departments).
The program is available to any graduate student in any Catholic University school or department and to admitted external applicants with an undergraduate degree.
It permits current students of other Catholic University graduate programs to double-count relevant courses (as is possible when a certificate program is combined with a degree program). To satisfy the disciplinary distribution requirements (see below), typically two courses may come from the student's graduate degree program and another three must be taken at other departments or schools.
The certificate program does not allow for transfer credit from other institutions. Graduate credit earned as part of the certificate may be transferred into master's and doctoral programs (at Catholic University or elsewhere) upon request if approved by those degree programs.

Minimally accepted TOEFL scores, when applying for graduate programs, are 550-paper, 213-computer, and 80 Internet. Students taking the TOEFL should have at least 20 out of 30 in each of the TOEFL subcategories. The minimally accepted graduate IELTS score is 6.5. Individual IELTS test module scores are also reviewed in addition to the overall IELTS score.