Frosh Outdo Seniors on U.S. History Test

A study released yesterday blasts U.S. colleges for failing to educate students about American history and its “founding principles.” But the survey, conducted by a conservative group, gives relatively good marks to Harvard, with seniors here scoring higher than students at any of the other 49 institutions studied.

The survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) found that seniors at some top-tier colleges—including Yale, Princeton, Duke, and Cornell—actually scored lower than their freshman peers.

“There is a great paucity of knowledge among students,” said Michael Andrews, director of ISI’s Jack Miller Center for the Teaching of America’s Founding Principles. “We wanted to come up with empirical evidence about what was the case on the ground.”

Administered to over 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 schools, the survey gauged “civic literacy” through 60 multiple-choice questions. Among other things, it quizzed students about the Puritans, the Constitution, and why “free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government’s centralized planning.”

On average, seniors nationwide answered about 54 percent of the questions correctly. Harvard seniors scored an average of 70 percent—almost 6 percent higher than freshmen here.

Harvard’s scores appeared to counter some critics of the University who have charged that students here are not sufficiently exposed to the basics of American history. Shortly after University President Lawrence H. Summers resigned in February 2006, columnist John Tierney wrote in The New York Times: “You might expect the Harvard history department to devote a course or two to the American Revolution or the Constitution, but those topics are too mundane.”

In October, Harvard made waves by unveiling a new general education system that includes a required course in “The United States and the World.” That new curriculum will begin to replace the Core next year.

Andrews argued that a lack of civic knowledge is leaving graduates unprepared for decisions they will have to make after finishing college.
“If a graduating senior doesn’t think that the Declaration of Independence came before the Constitution, their opinions are...going to be uninformed,” Andrews said.

But others dismiss the survey, saying its findings reflect its designers’ conservative views. ISI’s site says the institute aims to imbue college students with “a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society.” The institute’s president, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., served as President Ronald Reagan’s top domestic policy adviser.

“The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has long pushed for reforming higher education along more classical lines—and at the same time for integrating neo-conservative ideas into the college curriculum—and I see this study...as a political effort designed to energize such reforms,” Neil Gross, associate professor of sociology at Harvard, wrote in an e-mail.
But Andrews said that the goals of the survey transcend any ideological lines.

“It’s hard for anyone to stand up and say that it’s a good thing that only 45.9 percent of graduating seniors know that the line ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ comes from the Declaration of Independence,” Andrews said. “It’s hard to turn that into a partisan issue.”

The study was called “Failing Our Students, Failing America.”

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.edu.