The American Council of Trustees and Alumni today released the sixth edition of the What Will They Learn? ratings. At a time when 87% of employers believe that our colleges must raise the quality of students’ educations in order for the United States to remain competitive globally, and four in five Americans say they believe all graduates should have to take the key courses outlined in the study, few colleges require a real liberal arts education. The report and the companion website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, detail whether each school requires literature, U.S. government or history, foreign language, mathematics, economics, science, and composition. ACTA assigns each school a letter grade, and notes explain the grades assigned and noteworthy programs within schools.
Why do we teach U.S. history and government to students? The answer is simple: to prepare students for engaged and informed citizenry, the essential ingredient for preserving the American republic. Unfortunately, ACTA’s most recent What Will They Learn?® survey of the core curricula at over 1,100 colleges and universities found that only 18% of institutions require students […]
The Founders admonished that informed, engaged citizens would be the indispensable guardian of our liberty. ACTA’s surveys, however, administered over the past two decades, reveal that our schools—and especially our colleges and universities—have done a poor job of ensuring the civic literacy on which our nation depends. Too many institutions fail to require courses that […]
A new survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni sheds a bright light on our nation’s civic knowledge crisis. Colleges and universities significantly contribute to the problem by chipping away at their core requirements in essential areas of knowledge; students graduate unprepared for informed citizenship and the workforce. U.S. history is often […]
Don’t know much about history. Or literature, or foreign languages, or government, or economics, or … Giving it the old college try? Not so much. Many of today’s college students aren’t getting much of a college education. By some measures, they aren’t getting even a high school education. There’s been lots of talk of late […]
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is a nonpartisan higher-education organization that, for 20 years, has provided us with much-needed data on the quality of American institutions of higher education. ACTA recently released the 2015-2016 edition of its national survey of college curricula, titled,What Will They Learn? Sad to say, its findings generally are […]
Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.
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