Leaders of the University of Arkansas might or might not be pleased with how they fared in the new college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. But they can certainly take cheer from a report released on Wednesday by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an advocacy group with a traditionalist bent. The council rated 100 colleges according to the rigor of their course requirements for undergraduates—and Arkansas was one of only a handful of institutions to earn an A.
The report, "What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities," gives colleges credit if they require all students to take courses in seven realms: composition, literature, foreign languages, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and natural or physical science.
Five institutions, including Arkansas, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and the United States Military Academy, earned A's. A much larger group, including Amherst College, Williams College, and Yale University, earned F's.
"There are a lot of rankings out there," David Azerrad, a program officer at the council, said in an interview on Wednesday. "But nobody pays attention to what students are learning—to what's actually taking place in the classroom. So we decided to prepare not only a report that would be useful to administrators, but also a Web site that can put parents in a better position when they're looking at colleges for their kids."
The Web site, also called "What Will They Learn?," was unveiled on Wednesday. It now includes data for 127 colleges, and Mr. Azerrad said many more will be added.
Questioning the Criteria
Like the council's previous reports, this one has drawn skepticism from some other curriculum advocates.
"As is often the case with ACTA, they have posed some very good questions," said Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in an interview Wednesday. "But the methodology that they have used to explore those questions is extremely inadequate. They have basically just looked at the course catalogs of 100 colleges, and that's it."
It would be better, Ms. Humphreys said, to examine a wider range of colleges and to look more closely at the skills and substantive knowledge that students acquire in the classroom.
Ms. Humphreys also suggested that the council's report used "extremely narrow criteria" for some of its seven categories.
For example, many of the colleges covered in the report do require all students to take courses in literature, but the report does not give colleges credit for those requirements if students can fulfill them by taking courses on specific authors. "Narrow, single-author, or esoteric courses do not count for this requirement," the report says, "but introductions to broad subfields (such as British or Latin American literature) do."
Those rules were necessary, Mr. Azerrad said, because narrow and esoteric courses do not give students a solid grounding in culture. "Colleges pay lip service to the idea of general education," he said. "In practice, however, when you look at their actual requirements, they'll have very broad distribution requirements. If you look at Dartmouth, for example, they have a literature requirement. So you might say, Why is ACTA complaining? Well, it's because there are 300 courses that you can take to fulfill that requirement, including 'Digital Game Studies.'" (The Chronicle could not immediately verify that point. In Dartmouth's online course catalog, "Digital Game Studies" appears to be one of the few English courses that does not fulfill the literature requirement.)
The report applies similarly tight rules to composition requirements. Colleges get credit only if students are required to take courses taught by English or composition instructors. But "writing-intensive seminars" in history, political science, or psychology don't count.
Clark G. Ross, vice president for academic affairs at Davidson College, believes that criterion is silly. Davidson earned a C in the council's report; it did not get credit for its 11-year-old program that requires all first-year students to take a writing seminar.
"Reports like this do a disservice to the cause of curriculum reform," Mr. Ross said in an interview on Wednesday. "Frankly, it seems like grandstanding."
Mr. Ross said that Davidson's writing seminars all require at least 40 pages of writing over the course of the semester. And the courses have common goals that cover many elements of writing, rhetoric, and composition.
But the council's report did draw praise on Wednesday from one longtime observer of academe.
Murray A. Sperber, a visiting professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley who has written widely about college athletics and what he sees as the decline of the curriculum, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday that the council's report "documents higher education's dirty little secret: Schools are charging more each year and requiring many fewer traditional education courses. … This results in a legion of students with spotty educations and meaningless degrees."
Comments
1. evbiii - August 20, 2009 at 08:42 am
Wow! Professor Sperber's assessment is deep and unfortunately true. The sad part is the amount of debt this undereducated group is acculmulating to go along with those meaningless degrees.
2. jbloss2 - August 20, 2009 at 09:08 am
Their methodology is too shallow and simplistic to accurately compare institutions. It simply counts the number of core requirements the author deems important to determine a rating or grade. Conversely, more prestigious institutions have generally determined that more individual curriculum designed toward the student's goals have helped focus their education. The first red flag would be to review the institutions who receive an 'F' grade using this scale.
3. drdenesh - August 20, 2009 at 09:32 am
It's no surprise that ACTA upends conventional rankings. By pushing the so-called Students Bill of Rights, ACTA wants to take the "liberal" out of "liberal arts." In the thumbnail of its report, "How Many Ward Churchills?", the organization finds that Churchill is representative of what is common in academe: "throughout American higher education, professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically. The study offers concrete steps colleges and universities can take to ensure a balance between students' academic freedom to learn and professors' academic freedom to teach, research, and publish."
https://www.goacta.org/publications/index.cfm?categoryid=7E8C27F1-F33A-82AA-3C99C48597F0EEE0#EFD93B3A-B223-2B92-B8FF1C1B51572FF7
4. 11180037 - August 20, 2009 at 10:03 am
There is the ring of intellectualized nonsense in: "...more prestigious institutions have generally determined that more individual curriculum designed toward the student's goals have helped focus their education," suggesting such deep contemplation by each student in developing their goals, a laughable notion outside the insular halls of academia. From those who consider ACTA's methodology "too shallow and simplistic to accurately compare institutions," we would rightfully request alternatives, but see and hear little. Until the integrity of the degree is reestablished, which will be a long and painful journey back from mediocrity by way of valid measures of learning outcomes, we will have to resign ourselves to the various permutations of anecdotal evidence of quality education.
5. blue_state_academic - August 20, 2009 at 10:40 am
The ACTA rankings have nothing to do with measuring what students will learn at a particular college. All ACTA did was to look at information available on-line about the undergraduate general education requirements at each college, and determine how many courses are required in areas they deem important (i.e., DWM studies). There is nothing in their survey that measures what students learn.
6. 11180037 - August 20, 2009 at 10:54 am
To blue_state-academic: what part of "...we will have to resign ourselves to the various permutations of anecdotal evidence of quality education" was unclear? I thought it was apparent that this included ACTA. The big point is: where are the measures???
7. jesor - August 20, 2009 at 11:31 am
The largest problem I have with the ACTA report is that it attempts to codify a traditional academic structure without considering the value of alternative methods (i.e. the New School model) of making sure that students have both breadth and meaningful depth to their education. It also completely ignores whether or not students have a meaningful experience and gain meaningful knowledge in those required classes. In their methodology, it would be entirely possible for a university to require a student to take one broad course in each of those areas, but to have those courses made up of 400 seat lectures taught by a TA that in reality only require three days of attendance (syllabus, midterm, and final). The institution would get an A while the students would get to sleep in. So in that aspect the measurement is shallow and an attempt to refocus the conversation on curriculum structure when it should be on developing meaningful measurements of actual student learning and engagement. Of course for that, we'd still have to agree on what a Bachelor's degree is for in the first place.
8. trax530 - August 20, 2009 at 11:33 am
Why in a global age is U.S. history listed as a core course for gen ed and world history ignored?
Renee
9. mballen - August 20, 2009 at 12:34 pm
As a philosopher by training and an opponent of the increasing professionalization and specialization that plague the undergraduate curriculum at our colleges and universities, I'm sympathetic to the authors' goals. But they make the mistake of conflating curriculum with learning. That the top liberal arts colleges in the U.S. all receive F's is an invalidation of their methodology -- not of the colleges. What these top colleges are able to do in their courses is to have an incredibly high level of intellectual investigation and discussion -- and a pervasive atmosphere of intense intellectual engagement outside of class--that results in most of their students learning a great deal more about a broad range of subjects than do the great majority of students at less selective, less intellectually rigorous institutions. It's no accident that graduates of these institutions go on to graduate programs (in arts and sciences fields) in far greater proportion than do students from other colleges and universities. While I wish the specialization were somewhat less at the more selective schools, if my child were able enough (and received enough financial support) to send him/her to one of them, there's no question I'd do it in a heartbeat.
10. fossil - August 20, 2009 at 01:25 pm
ACTA is indeed grandstanding, but there is a serious point lurking underneath. The question is the degree to which an institution and its students are committed to a notion of education that recognizes the necessity of acquiring a kernel of knowledge about civilization (more specifically, western civilization), its values, accomplishments, and conflicts. A course catalog can tell you a little, but not everything. "Osmosis", for want of a better word, is a process that is deeply involved in inculcating this kind of understanding--but it is virtually impossible to measure.
I consider myself to have obtained an excellent undergraduate education, this despite the fact that my personal curriculoum was almost absurdly skewed toward high-level courses in my chosen field, math. I didn't take a Shakespeare course, or a world history course, or a music survey course--but, somehow, through personal reading, listening, discussion, and simply paying attention to what was "in the air", I picked up quite a bit of knowledge, often refracted through intelligent commentary and analysis. One can read Shakespeare without having his work on one's required reading list; likewise, absorbing some knowledge of Beethoven, Plato, Decartes, Gibbon, or Darwin, or of the Peloponesian War, the Roman Civil Wars, the Hundred Years War, The Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, or World Wars I and II, doesn't necessarily entail registering in any related courses. That's one of the reasons there are libraries and bookstores.
Education isn't a mechanical process. How and why it happens (when it does) is still rather mysterious. But, it is fair to say, a university culture that encourages bread and circuses, whether in the form of BCS football teams or sophomoric enthusiasm for the newest trends in quasi-humanistic "theory", and "cultural studies" sabotages the process, irrespective of what the catalog might contain.
11. tookt - August 20, 2009 at 01:33 pm
Both fossil and mballen raise valid points--the encouragement of intellectual curiousity and serious academic discussion are far more important than the criteria ACTA have used to "measure" colleges.
It's the difficulty of measuring curiousity and serious discussion that make rankings relatively useless.
12. la_profesora - August 20, 2009 at 02:09 pm
Another year, another set of US News Rankings, another new rankings system purporting to be superior to US News created by yet another group with an axe to grind...ho, hum.
13. softshellcrab - August 20, 2009 at 05:40 pm
Want to avoid meaningless degrees? Either get rid of online courses altogether, or require labeling and warning where more than 20% of the coursework for the degree was online.
14. ewp1872 - August 20, 2009 at 08:07 pm
As the prof of the "Digital Games Studies" class at Dartmouth, I can confirm that it does not satisfy the literature requirement at Dartmouth, nor should it. But given the curriculum of the class, it would be appropriate for it to satisfy a number of other broad distributive requirements, including a requirement in philosophy. The problem with ACTA's measurements is that they would likely dismiss my class out of hand (based only on its title) as fluffy and unserious. As others have pointed out, it would be folly to measure the value of a curriculum on the basis of the names of its classes. Even syllabi, though much more informative, provide only a distant view of the actual material and the quality of the teaching and learning in the class. I affirm many of the values that (I suspect) motivate ACTA's alternative rankings, as the USNews rankings are insidious. But a noble goal does not ensure a good outcome, and my guess is that ACTA's evaluations are at least as politicized and hypocritical as USNews.
15. _perplexed_ - August 21, 2009 at 12:42 pm
When I first glanced at ACTA's evaluations, I too suspected that their report was political grandstanding. But after going to their website (http://www.goacta.org/about/senior-staff.cfm) and reading the provided information about their five senior staffers another possibility came to mind. Rather than impugn their motives, I now question their expertise. My guess is that any random group of five CHE subscribers have more collective experience evaluating liberal arts curriculum than does the ACTA staff.