According to a Washington Post article, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni is displeased with the recent trend among top American universities to ignore the concept of core requirements. The group faults schools like Brown, Cornell, Yale, and UC Berkeley for “failing to require students to take courses in more than one of seven core academic subjects: math, science, history, economics, foreign language, literature and composition.”
Anne Neal, president of the trustees group, explains, “We’re certainly not saying that Harvard or Hopkins or Yale are not good schools, or that their graduates are not smart kids. What we’re saying is that those schools don’t do a good job at providing their students with a coherent core….At Stanford, [for example,] you can fulfill the American cultures requirement by taking a class on the Japanese drum.”
Supporters of the no-core curriculum argue that college is intended to teach students how “to think, solve problems and change the world,” not to force a required “compendium of facts” down their throats. Schools who embrace this attitude (with Brown leading the pack) believe that core curriculums are “old school.”
Few colleges hold tight to the core tradition of “survey[ing] the span of human knowledge.” Columbia University and the University of Chicago require a core curriculum, as does St. John’s College, a school that focuses almost its entire curriculum on the “great books.”
Here are some of the ratings (as determined by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni):
St. John’s College – A
Texas A&M University – A
US Air Force Academy – A
US Military Academy – A
Columbia University – B
University of Chicago – B
New York University – B
Boston University – B
Duke University – B
Barnard College – C
University of California – Los Angeles – C
Stanford – C
Cornell College – C
Dartmouth College – C
Georgetown University – D
University of Pennsylvania – D
University of Virginia – D
Harvard – D
Johns Hopkins University – F
University of California – Berkeley – F
Brown University – F
Yale – F
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Read the full article: Top Schools Receive Poor Grades in General Requirements
