The combination of the content of Civics and professional courses in colleges and universities is one of the important contents of general education in colleges and universities in recent years. The article introduces machine learning algorithms into this field to explore the optimization path of western economics course civics in colleges and universities. After developing the resources of western economics course civics, the content generation model of western economics course civics is constructed by using the content generation algorithm based on pre-training model and keywordawareness, respectively. Then the text generation performance of the proposed content generation model is examined. The results of the teaching experiments of the experimental group and the control group are compared to explore the effectiveness of this paper’s machine-learning-based content optimization and practice path of western economics course civics on improving students’ performance. The F1 values of this paper’s content generation model on the ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L indicators are 39.06%, 24.79%, and 36.65%, respectively, which is the optimal performance among all models. The students in the experimental group and the control group had the same level of Civics in Western Economics course before the experiment. After the experiment, the two groups produced a score difference of about 5 points on the 8 content dimensions, and the p-values were all less than 0.05. The experimental group’s postexperimental performance in course civics were all significantly improved (p0.05). The content optimization and practice path of western economics course Civics based on machine learning can significantly improve the learning effect of students.