Colorado’s colleges continue to earn respectable rankings in U.S. News & World Report’s Best College survey, but a conservative group says the schools aren’t giving students the underpinnings of a complete education.
The group, the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni, graded 714 colleges and universities across the U.S. — 15 in Colorado — on their requirements for students to study seven core subjects: composition, math, science, economics, foreign language, literature, and American government or U.S. history.
The criteria call for: a writing class focused on grammar, style, clarity and argument; a literature survey course; three semesters of foreign language; a broad American history or government course; basic economics; college-level math; and a course in biology, geology, chemistry, physics or environmental science, preferably with a laboratory component.
Based on those criteria, the study found that nationally, schools public and private are “failing to ensure students cover critical subjects, most notably economics and U.S. government or history.”
Among the findings:
• Less than 5 percent of colleges and universities require economics.
• Less than a third require American government or history, literature or intermediate-level foreign language.
• Nearly 40 percent don’t require college-level mathematics.
“I would love to have all those things in the curriculum for all, but they aren’t critical for all students,” said David Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and a former assistant education secretary.
Students take courses they will need to pursue a career, he said.
“When you put in more general-education and liberal-arts requirements, you restrict them in what they can get in their field of study,” he said.
Of the 15 Colorado institutions rated, only one, the U.S. Air Force Academy, where six of the subjects are required, received an A.
Second-highest on the list is Regis University, where students must take five of the seven.
The University of Colorado, where core requirements include composition, a foreign language and science, received a C.
The University of Denver, where composition, math and science are required, also rated a C. But DU does require a foreign language, said DU spokesman Jim Berscheidt.
DU doesn’t get credit for language because only one year is required, said ACTA senior researcher David Azerrad. ACTA doesn’t give the school credit because “students may fulfill the requirement with elementary-level study,” he said in an e-mail. “The aim of having an intermediate foreign-language requirement is to bring students to the point at which they can begin to use a language meaningfully.”
Colorado colleges and universities offer a state-legislated general-education core curriculum, said CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue.
“An effective core curriculum can’t be defined by checking off boxes on a report card,” he said.
Colorado State University spokesman Brad Bohlander said classes taught at the school — which received C’s for core requirements on the Pueblo and Fort Collins campuses — might not always fit into a ranking organization’s categories. But core requirements do provide all CSU undergraduate students with a comprehensive, balanced, well- rounded education, he said.
Liberal groups have attacked Washington, D.C.-based ACTA, saying the organization engages in an ideological attack on higher education. Some of the co-founders of ACTA are former Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.
In a 2001 report, the nonprofit said college and university faculty have been a weak link in America’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
How Colo. campuses fared in survey
U.S. News & World Report’s 2011 “Best Colleges” report, published Tuesday, found:
• The University of Colorado at Boulder ranked 39th among the top 50 “Best Public National Universities.”
• Colorado School of Mines ranked 29th in the top 50 “Best Public National Universities.”
• CU-Colorado Springs tied for seventh among top public universities in the West.
• UC Denver’s downtown campus ranked 107th among the top national public universities.
• Colorado State University in Fort Collins ranked 60th among national public universities, up from 64th last year.
• The University of Denver ranked 11th in the magazine’s national universities’ “Up and Comers” list. DU also ranked 86th among the nation’s top 100 universities.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporter’s error, ACTA co-founder Lynne Cheney’s was misspelled. The group’s co-founders also include
former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown, sociologist David Riesman, Nobel
laureate Saul Bellow and New Republic editor-in-chief Martin
Peretz.
