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.”