days of wine and roses

For all that, the methodology page does not seem to have any glaringly obvious errors. We're assured of randomness in respondent selection (although it's not made clear how they were "screened for qualification", but I'll pass over that for now), and describe their 5-stage quality control process (truth be told, I'm confused about whether the Regional Managers were themselves from ISI, but again, I suspend judgment). Let's assume this study meets our standards for procuring a representative sample.

What bothers me is that the ISI is quick to conclude from their rankings that this accurately identifies the schools where students are learning the most areas of important civic knowledge, and that in "the bottom 16 ranked colleges, the average freshman score was higher than the average senior score, indicating that seniors at these schools actually saw their knowledge of these crucial subjects decline during their years of undergraduate study." Moreover, schools at the bottom are more likely to be "among the most prestigious in the nation," whereas the top of the list is populated by smaller (often Christian) colleges. Shocking. Is the liberal university really a bastion of ignorance? This is what Kantor goes off on, blaming "politically correct college professors" teaching the new generation to "spurn the very things that students used to learn to love and delight in," like "patriotism, civic responsibility, or traditional morality" (she goes on to add an appreciation for Western culture).

This would be pretty remarkable if true. Fortunately, it's far from it. For one thing, take a closer look at the list, particular those 16 schools which are our centers of unlearning. Unless she meant Wofford College with her reference to the most prestigious, the strikingly poor performance is coming from University of Michigan, University of Chicago, MIT, University of Virginia, Georgetown, Yale, Duke, Brown, Cornell, UCBerkeley and Johns Hopkins. A pretty impressive roster for unlearning institutions. Interestingly, the mean scores for seniors on these tests are still pretty high for all these schools, because (unsurprisingly) their freshman also score very highly. In fact, the scores for these schools after "unlearning" are still higher than most of those on the top of the list. The mean for these 11 schools senior scores comes to 62.4727, where that of the top 11 schools came to 51.2454. Seems to me this study indicated that students at top universities are generally more knowledgeable than those at smaller regional colleges. Not very surprising.

But there is still the fact that they saw more frequent decrease in scores from freshman to seniors, some of them substantial. I don't know why they didn't bother testing sophomores and juniors, but that's another issue. What is interesting is the exact type of knowledge being tested. If you scroll down from the list, you get a table of questions by topic. It's not the easiest list to work with, and I don't have the patience to do so right now, but if you scan the numbers in the "Rank by Gain" column on the far right, you can see which topics troubled seniors the most, comparatively. The 10 lowest ranked are:

The Federalist Papers
Enumerated powers
President Washington’s foreign policy
Monroe Doctrine
Reconstruction
Federal budget
Marbury v. Madison
Chronology of major historical events
Outcome of the War of 1812
The American Revolutionary War

This should sound familiar to most people; it's the stuff you learn in high school. Here's another shocking test result one might predict: college freshman also outperform people in their 30s. The more appropriate conclusion seems to be "people forget what they learned in high school over time," which I could have told you without a study.

Now I trust ISI (and Kantor) are making the more substantive claim that these things should be emphasized more, in college education and American society in general. I have no problems with that as a claim. But it's by no means clear that every college student should be drilled on facts of American history as necessary training for their intended occupation. Let me take as examples the top and bottom ranked schools. This website is pretty atrocious, but was the best I could do for statistics on popular majors at Rhodes College and Johns Hopkins, and it's pretty uninformative as things go. But it does tell us that Rhodes has 25% social sciences and 13% English as its leading majors, compared to JHU's 21% medicine and 19% engineering (it's not clear from the stats if this factors in graduate students - again, not the best website). This does suggest the majority of respondents at JHU (when you factor in biology and CS, 8 and 5 respectively) are in science or engineering majors, who I frankly don't fault for forgetting some facts about Marbury, important as I think the latter is.

I was originally planning to take on Kantor's argument more specifically, but actually looking at the study she cites makes it clear she's just tossing off uninformed speculation on the leftist tendencies in academia causing a trend that doesn't seem to exist. Students who are exceedingly critical of the western corpus and the enlightenment project probably held those views going into college, and a more traditional English professor arguing the merits of Shakespeare, while perhaps usefully providing a different perspective, would probably be wasting her breath. And besides, I should think we want students to think critically about whatever they learn, in addition to learning to appreciate the literary quality of works they read.