Elite schools reverse students' knowledge of U.S. history, civics
From the AFA Journal
OneNewsNow.com
February 10, 2007

A recent study of college students shows that those attending elite schools such as Yale and Cornell tend to lose more of their knowledge of U.S. history and government while at the school than do their counterparts at smaller, less prestigious colleges.

Some of America's Ivy League universities are going backward when it comes to teaching civic affairs. Students at prestigious schools such as Yale, Duke, Cornell, Brown and Georgetown lost knowledge of American history and government between their freshman and senior years.

Conversely, smaller, less prominent campuses showed moderate success in teaching U.S. history, government and civics. More than 14,000 students at 50 schools participated in the three-year study. The startling facts are revealed in "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship," a new study from Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

According to ISI, a non-profit educational organization, Johns Hopkins led the losers with student knowledge loss of 7.3%. Also in the bottom ten were Cornell (-3.3%), Duke (-2.3%) and Yale (-1.5%).

Among the colleges where students actually learned something about American history and government, the top four were Rhodes College (+11.6%), Colorado State (+10%), Calvin College (+9.5%) and Grove City College (+9.4%). article