The Choice Channel

“Does going to college make students better-educated citizens? A new study of more than 14,000 randomly selected college students from across the country concludes that the answer is often no. Not only did many respondents at the 50 participating colleges fail to answer half of the basic civics questions correctly, but at such elite schools as Cornell, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, the college freshmen scored higher than the college seniors. Josiah Bunting, III, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the nonprofit that funded the study, decried “the students’ dismal scores” as providing ‘high-quality evidence of … nothing less than a coming crisis in American citizenship.’ Mike Ratliff, a senior vice president at the ISI spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Pat Wingert about the study’s findings, which were released today.” (09/26/06)