Tuesday morning the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (full disclosure: they’re my favorite higher ed nonprofit), help a conference at the National Press Club to release the results of their latest survey of civic literacy and higher education. The title was appropriately blunt, “Failing our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America’s History and Institutions.” The basis was a survey ISI commissioned from the University of Connecticut’s Dept. of Public Policy. It was given to over 14,000 college freshmen and seniors, and assessed their knowledge of American history and government, America and the world and the market economy. The basis of analysis was simple: compare the scores of the freshmen at a school to those of the seniors in order to see how four years of undergraduate education has improved their civic knowledge.

You can take the survey yourself here. The questions are hardly esoteric.

The results were grim. No school could claim even a “C” average for its seniors. Harvard, whose senior class performed the best, scraped a “D+.” Even worse, college, on average, hinders the acquisition of civic knowledge , and the most expensive and prestigious schools often decreased their students’ understanding of basic American civics. Of the 50 schools surveyed, the bottom five included Princeton, Duke, Yale, and Cornell, all of which saw seniors post lower scores than their freshmen did. Harvard was the best of the Ivy League, boosting scores from 63.6% to 69.6%.

The top five schools were Eastern Conn. State U (with a gain of 9.7% in scores), Marian College (+9.4%), Murray State U. (+9.1%), Concordia U. (+9%), and St. Cloud State U. (+8.6%). To be sure, the more prestigious schools generally had higher scores from both freshman and seniors. But the evidence is clear that, for example, Yale students outperformed their Pfeiffer U. counterparts because of excellence before college. Yale attendees lost basic civic knowledge (-3.1%), while Pfeiffer U. students gained (+8.25%). What’s the point of the best high school kids in the nation going to Yale when it will take them from a “C-” to a “D” over four years? Pfeiffer might be getting third-rate students, but at least they’re learning.

This study controlled for different course concentrations not by asking about majors, but by asking students how many courses they had taken in civics (American history, economics, and the like). This allowed the researchers to see how scores improved (or didn’t) as a result of civics courses. Once again, Yale, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell took 4 of the 5 lowest spots. Students at Cornell fared the worst, with the average student losing 1.8% on the test for each civics course taken. Concordia U. was the best, with students gaining 3.72% for each civics course.

As dramatic as some of these results are (go to Yale, lose knowledge!), the problem isn’t just in those schools where seniors scored lower than the freshman. College is supposed to draw the best and brightest for further instruction, and schools love to proclaim that they are producing better citizens. But for many schools, the rate of knowledge acquisition in the undergraduate years was slower than it had been previously. At U. Penn., students were barely nudged, from a 62.7% to a 63.5%. Random guessing would score 20% on the multiple choice test. So we can assume that 1st through 12th grades increased student scores by at least 42.7%. Four more years of education at U. Penn. added only another .8%, even though the “D” average of incoming freshman left plenty of room for upward movement.

Americans spend billions on higher education. Parents save to pay for their children, state and federal governments spend oodles on universities, Americans owe tens of billions of dollars in student loans, and donors give billions in charitable donations to schools. But this doesn’t produce even a minimally informed citizenry. In fact, the study found that the more tuition cost, the less student scores improved. Clearly, there needs to be accountability, and it is to be hoped that ISI’s study will help provide that. The results have been released to the schools as well as the media, in the hope that interested parties will take action.

At the conference I asked whether part of the problem might not be that the consumers of higher education don’t want civic literacy so much as advanced career prospects. Most students, in my view, go to college so they may earn more money later, not because they are interested in the life of the mind. Many view universities as nothing more than glorified job training firms. Those presenting the report agreed that this was indeed part of the problem (the very idea of “consumers” of education was cited as harmful to the traditional mission of the university), but insisted that those responsible for higher education must stand firm and insist that they have a mission to produce knowledgeable citizens as well as qualified employees.