The American Council of Trustees and Alumni today released the seventh edition of the What Will They Learn? ratings. Early this year, in a Gallup survey of universities, nearly 100% of provosts said they felt their institutions were either “very effective” or “somewhat effective” at preparing students for the workforce. But a survey of employers showed that over 70% found college graduates were not well-prepared in skills such as “written communication,” “working with numbers/statistics,” “critical/analytical thinking,” and second-language proficiency. This is a wake-up call for students, parents, and policymakers, at a time when college graduates are already too familiar with both financial debt and intellectual deficit. This report and the companion website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, evaluates the core requirements at over 1,100 institutions and details whether each school requires literature, U.S. government or history, foreign language, mathematics, economics, science, and composition. ACTA assigns each school a letter grade, and notes explain the grades assigned and noteworthy programs within schools.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni today released the sixth edition of the What Will They Learn? ratings. At a time when 87% of employers believe that our colleges must raise the quality of students’ educations in order for the United States to remain competitive globally, and four in five Americans say they believe […]
The idealism of the information age has given way to serious concerns about the proliferation of misinformation, which travels faster than you can say “retweet.” Americans rely on their institutions of higher education to provide students with the knowledge they need to question prevailing orthodoxies and think critically about important issues facing the nation. Many […]
In this 10th edition of its flagship annual survey of college general education curricula, What Will They Learn?, ACTA shines a light on the wide disparity in academic standards at institutions of higher learning across the country. What Will They Learn? reviews the core curricula of over 1,100 four-year public and private institutions across the country […]
Teens and young adults can tell you who Post Malone, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X are. Their parents could tell you who quarterbacks their favorite football teams, or which contestant got eliminated last week on their favorite reality TV competition. Could all of them tell you who America’s third president was? Or even name […]
For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college? […]
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is a nonpartisan higher-education organization that, for 20 years, has provided us with much-needed data on the quality of American institutions of higher education. ACTA recently released the 2015-2016 edition of its national survey of college curricula, titled,What Will They Learn? Sad to say, its findings generally are […]
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