From The New Criterion:
A college education—that is, a college degree: education needn’t come into the picture—can cost upwards of $200,000 these days. The average student leaves the old ivy-covered halls almost $20,000 in debt. And what do they get for their pains? Not a lot. That, anyway, is the sobering message of The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions, a new study undertaken by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s National Civic Literary Board and the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy. The ambitious study—its findings are available online at this web address: http://www.americancivicliteracy.org—canvassed more than 14,000 college freshmen and seniors about their knowledge of American history and political institutions. Some of the depressing highlights: Seniors scored 1.5 percent higher on average than freshmen. In other words, four years and a couple hundred grand doesn’t buy much knowledge of American history. If the survey had been administered as an examination, seniors would fail with an average score of 53.2 percent The more elite institutions do not perform better than their less prestigious cousins—far from it. The report indicates that at Brown, Georgetown, and Yale (among other elite institutions), seniors emerge from their studies knowing less about American history and foreign affairs than freshmen.
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