New Data: Students Ready to Learn, but Colleges Fail to Require Essential Classes

What do college students know?

Not much.

So suggests polling just released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and College Pulse. The Forgotten Fundamentals, second in a series of surveys on college students’ basic knowledge, adds questions about general arts and sciences to its predecessor’s focus on civics and government. Among the more depressing results: More students identified Charles Dickens as the author of Moby Dick (42%) than Herman Melville (35%). Such errors should not come as a surprise, given that 79% said they had not taken a college literature course. Students do not know much about literature because they are not taking literature classes.

But why?

ACTA’s What Will They Learn?® project, which assigns a letter grade to more than 1,000 colleges’ general education programs, shows that since 2009, universities have weakened requirements for students to take courses outside their majors and minors. According to the most recent published data, only 25% of universities require a literature class, a figure comparable to the 21% of students who said they had completed one.

Indeed, standards have decreased across the arts, hard sciences, and social sciences. Preliminary data from the latest What Will They Learn?® review—scheduled for release in 2026—show that roughly twice as many schools weakened their general education requirements as strengthened them. For example, Grand Valley State University’s grade slipped from a “D” to an “F” because it began allowing students to satisfy their math requirement with courses that contain little college-level material.

Would strengthening general education requirements improve students’ knowledge, or would they make little effort to learn material outside their majors?

ACTA’s surveys suggest undergraduates would benefit from extra required classes. The data show that 59% of college students completed a course on U.S. history, whereas just 21% have taken a literature class. Although 59% is still too low and undergraduates’ knowledge of American history remains unsatisfactory, students tend to know more about history than literature: A plurality (45%) answered that the Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison established the doctrine of judicial review, whereas only 35% correctly identified Melville as the author of Moby Dick. Completing a class (unsurprisingly) seems to correlate roughly with knowledge of its subject matter.

While general knowledge remains poor, ACTA’s arts and sciences survey shows that students have a strong appetite for learning. Although undergraduates scored poorly on every other survey question, 85% recognized Robert Oppenheimer as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The survey did not ask respondents how they learned about Dr. Oppenheimer’s role in developing the first nuclear weapon during World War II, but the source very likely was the wildly popular 2023 film Oppenheimer.

The survey data and popularity of Oppenheimer suggest that students retain information put before them. The trouble lies in colleges’ failure to require classes that expose undergraduates to subjects across the arts and sciences. Students’ knowledge likely will remain poor as long as universities fail to set higher standards.