Is Our College Students Learning?

Because yet another fresh wave of research results has come in saying that they... well, isn't.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute distributed a multiple choice test on American History and Civics, quizzing college freshmen and seniors on basic tenets of the Constitution and important U.S. events.

As expected, this exposed a problem, and not just that both groups failed the test on average, but that the seniors averaged only slightly higher than the freshmen -- and those were the more positive cases. In fact, of the 50 colleges ranked in the survey, "seniors at 16 institutions, including Cornell, Brown, Yale and Georgetown, scored lower than freshmen did at their school." Makes one wish that we were drawing more of our nation's political leaders from, say, DeVry.

But that wouldn't change the fact that 28 percent of college seniors will leave their institutions believing that the battle that ended the American Revolution was Gettysburg. Or the fact that more than half of graduates won't know that the Bill of Rights clearly prohibits a state religion.

So why the dearth of knowledge in this area among young scholars, and why do some institutions, statistically speaking, appear to be sucking it from their brains?

The first explanation that comes to my mind is that the curricula on American History and government are usually only required in high school, and they are easily avoidable thereafter. Even liberal arts undergrads can bypass all courses in those subjects on their way to a degree in Philosophy, Ethnic Studies, Economics, etc. As a result, those 10th-grade civics classes fall out of their heads by the time someone hands them the degree. Unless, of course, the students pursue that sort of wisdom on their own time, but the test failures indicate that students by-and-large lack this interest to begin with.

The study found that universities that required American History courses did in fact outscore those that didn't, but this doesn't make it an easy remedy to apply to other universities, or mine, I at least know. Should UCCS mandate these courses for non-History degrees, I see the announcement being met with flaming torches and pitchforks. The chancellors and deans shall bear the wrath of students in Engineering, Bio/Chem, Business, and Nursing who will shake fists against any additional chore in their college experience that they can't reasonably include on a resume. It's part of the collective mentality of students at UCCS (and surely at many colleges elsewhere) that if it can't get you a job, it's not worth the tuition fees. The "broad education" concept just doesn't fly here, and when a university tries to implement a new graduation requirement based on that concept, the school's paying customers tend to rumble with opposition.

So American History courses aren't typically sought after by non-History majors, but neither are they by most History majors, for that matter. To the average History student, the topic of America's foundation usually isn't "interesting" enough, and s/he would more likely fill a seat in a Chinese history course or one on the politics of the nineteenth-century unification of Germany.
My friend, Patrick, who's a History grad student and teaching assistant at UCCS, sees about a 2:3 ratio of "Americanists" to students specializing in other regions, and that divide is imagineably much wider in schools with greater student diversity than ours (of which there are quite many). Some students consider it ethnocentric to focus on our own nation's origins, he says, and many of them prefer to branch out and study other cultures. As a result, the more exotic, specialized areas of history are in greater demand among its scholars, regardless of what the field itself supplies in paying careers. Needless to say, this doesn't bode well for said scholars' financial prospects, yet I'll admit the origin of the Jin Dynasty is interesting.

So there are those students to whom the applicability of their study isn't an issue, and even they feel that a shot of U.S. History in their academic coffee is something they can do without. Still, there's the problem -- this knowledge is not in demand, and it's sorely lacking as a result.

To make U.S. History classes a requirement in more colleges is an effective solution in theory. Trouble is, they would meet plenty of resistence from the students, themselves. So what, then, does that say about how much (or little) we value this collective self-knowledge that other nations in the world find so fundamental?