American Students Get Dumber at College

by Daniel Pipes
Tue, 26 Sep 2006
updated Mon, 2 Oct 2006

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Recent decades have witnessed no end of surveys indicating the appalling ignorance of high school or college students. But a study just released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, "‘The Coming Crisis in Citizenship' Survey Results," breaks new ground in several ways, as Mike Ratliff, senior vice president at ISI explains. First, with a sample of 14,000 students at 50 schools, it is the largest study ever done on the topic.

Second, Ratcliff explains how the survey shows "that at 16 of the 50 schools, the freshmen did better than the seniors. We were startled by the extent of what we call ‘negative learning.' When courses are not offered or required, the students forget what they knew when they entered as freshmen, and that 16 included some of the best schools in the country, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke."

Third, the survey reveals "that on some campuses—like Rhodes College and Grove City College—that the amount of learning that was taking place was disproportionate to someplace like Harvard or Princeton. These are campuses that value classroom education and the professors are more focused on making sure the students are learning."

Fourth, students attending the most prestigious colleges start out with higher scores as freshman, getting 60-70 percent of the questions correct. "But the seniors at Rhodes and Grove caught up with many of them by senior year, while the scores of many of the students at the prestigious schools dropped by senior year."

Comment: Rhodes and Grove City are two of the very few conservative colleges in the whole of the United States. (September 26, 2006)

Related Topics: Academia

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Reader comments on this weblog entry

Title	By	Date
Rhodes College NOT conservative [33 words]	Ruth McClain	Nov 24, 2006 17:09
Many other factors [282 words]	Ben	Nov 2, 2006 20:24
↔ Ben [64 words]	Michael	Nov 24, 2006 19:39
The problem with the universities came when they greedily reached forth their hands and took... [124 words]	Rick House	Oct 30, 2006 15:44
50 Years of Public Education [315 words]	D Williams	Oct 24, 2006 21:18
↔ sadly correct.. [200 words]	donvan	Oct 26, 2006 17:04
↔ yup... [49 words]	Wolfgang	Dec 8, 2006 14:46
Negative Leaning [42 words]	Ben Samuel	Oct 9, 2006 12:54

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