College Guide
Blog
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) recently released its annual report on the courses American colleges require students to take. The report, “What Will They Learn,” assigns letter grades to colleges based on the number of core courses all students have to take and pass in order to graduate. We spoke with ACTA President Anne Neal (right) about the report.
Washington Monthly: What was the original thought behind “What Will They Learn”—what is it that made you guys decide that this was what the world needed?
Anne Neal: We wanted to take a look at the value added by the educational institution— actually happens when the student gets there, what is the educational framework that the school brings to bear, and so we decided to do a ratings system that is exactly what we called it: “what will they learn.”
WM: What were you surprised to discover the first time you did the ratings?
AN: We’ve been surprised that the state of disarray, in terms of a coherent core, was much broader than we had anticipated.
WM: What do you mean by that?
AN: We were trying to find out whether or not schools had a coherent general education curriculum. Most college catalogues promise parents and students that graduates will have exposure to key areas of knowledge and skills that they will need for success after graduation. So we looked at the actual requirements; we go to the catalogs and look at what students and parents see—in other words, the public information in terms of what’s required.
We found that there were many distribution requirements, but that under those distribution requirements there were hundreds or thousands of courses that students could choose from, so that it was possible to entirely miss exposure to American history or government, to economics, literature, foreign language at an intermediate level. Even though schools were promising a coherent general education, for the most part, they were not giving it.
WM: Are these only the requirements of the institution itself, or do you get down to what courses students actually take, the major requirements and college requirements within the institutions?
AN: We don’t look at specific concentration requirements. All we look at is what we refer to as the core curriculum, that is, those courses outside the major that the students take, generally to be exposed to broad areas of knowledge—essentially the breadth requirement.
We don’t look at the individual majors.
WM: What are the schools that you see to have rigorous core requirements, basically the core requirements that you want all students to take?
AN: We have seven core subjects that we look at. Composition, literature, American history or government, math, science, economics, and foreign language at an intermediate level. Certainly there are many other courses that are valuable and wonderful. But it’s our contention that to have a basically strong general education, most cores would have these seven key subjects. We grade on the basis of the number of those subjects that are required, so if a school has six or seven of these seven areas, that school gets an A, four or five gets a B, three requirements gets a C.
We have nineteen this year that are A grades on our website—we actually have an A-list—and it ranges from Baylor to Gardner-Webb to Morehouse to Pepperdine to Texas A&M to the US Military Academy. These schools had a strong educational framework when it came to the core curriculum., We also note when a school uses some sort of measurement of student learning.
WM: In the history of academia in the United States, is there a movement toward more core requirements or less of them? Did we used to require more core subjects out of our students, say, 100 years ago?
AN: I think what we’ve seen is a gradual growth in the number of courses that satisfy requirements, and elimination of the kind of prerequisites that we used to have. I know a study has been done, called “The Dissolution of Higher Education.” What it tracked was that over time, a limited number of core courses gradually grew to a whole range of courses from which students could pick and choose.
WM: Why did that happen?
AN: Over the years, particularly post-GI bill, these have been very good days for higher ed. In the last thirty or forty years they have had many, many resources, a lot of dollars, and the number of courses simply grew. I’m not even sure it was intended; faculty would say, “I’d like to teach this, can this fulfill that requirement,” and other faculty would ask to have their course, and so gradually there grew up vast numbers of courses that met the core requirements. I think one of the reasons that right now is such an interesting time to be looking at this is that, as these courses that satisfied requirements grew, they grew with real cost consequences. One of the points that we have been making in reaching out to trustees is that not only can you provide a more coherent curriculum by reducing the number of courses, you can also find ways to cut costs. Here is an opportunity to cut costs and improve quality.
WM: Okay. Are there any schools that have made that move?
Facebook
Twitter
