The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently ranked Johns Hopkins as having the lowest "civic literacy" out of the 50 U.S. colleges surveyed to conclude if traditional curriculums better instill among students a basic knowledge of American government and history.
Half of the schools surveyed were ranked in the top 25 of the 2007 U.S. News & World Report National Universities ranking, and the other half were randomly chosen to represent four-year institutions across the country.
At each school only freshman and senior students were surveyed with six multiple-choice questions touching on the general topics of American history and foreign policy. The rankings were based on the percentage increase or decrease in correct answers between the college's freshman and senior, in an attempt to determine whether or not the school fosters this knowledge within their curriculum.
According to the report, Hopkins students take an average of 2.9 history and political science courses during their senior year, while those at top-ranked Rhodes College, a private, liberal arts school in Memphis, Tenn., averaged 4.2 such courses in their last year.
However undergraduate teachers don't always believe this average represents a lack of knowledge on the part of students, Jeremy Arnold, graduate student and teaching assistant
for Introduction to American Politics, said, "I don't think Hopkins students write essays well, but they are informed on matters of American politics."
Hopkins seniors scored 7.3 percent less than freshmen at the University, whereas Rhodes seniors increased by 12 percent during their four years.
In response to the ranking senior political science major Lord Robinson said, "Here at Hopkins we already know that civics is the process of state-building and creating a national identity, we already view ourselves as citizens of America; such questions are unnecessary."
Hopkins freshmen scored an average 61.7 percent on the civic literacy test, well above the 50.6 percent average for Rhodes College first-year students. Even after their decline to 54.4 percent, Hopkins seniors still scored above the national average of 53.2 percent for college seniors.
The average freshman test score at Florida Memorial University, for example, was 24.4 percent and increased to only 31.2 percent by senior year. But that 6.8 percent gain was sufficient to place the Miami college in ninth place according to the ranking system.
Hopkins wasn't the only elite university at the bottom of the rankings, which also included Brown, Cornell, Duke, Yale and Georgetown universities.
Ranking just behind Rhodes were Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., and Calvin College, a Christian college in Grand Rapids, Mich.
This discrepancy between the prestigious universities and lesser-known schools has been attributed to the specialized nature of study at these universities as opposed to the traditional core at the other liberal arts colleges.
"I think this shows," Josiah Bunting III, chairman of the institute's National Civic Literacy Board and a former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, said, "That for whatever reason, students at Hopkins, perhaps more than students at other schools, do not enroll or are not obliged to enroll in some of the traditional core staples of civic literacy subjects.
"Nowadays, there appears to be a very high correlation between the prestige of a university and the reluctance of those institutions to provide a fixed or core curriculum," Bunting said.
The ISI, a Delaware-based non-profit, advocates for a traditional curriculum on campus. The organization commissioned the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy to design and conduct the poll.
ISI was founded in 1953 to "further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political and ethical values that sustain a free and humane society," according to their mission statement.
The Institute sees these low scores as an indication that America's youth is uncommitted to their national responsibilities. "Today's college students, who are America's future leaders, must understand their nation's history and founding principles if they are to be informed, engaged citizens prepared and motivated to improve the public life of their communities and their nation," said Bunting.
