College Seniors No More Knowledgeable Than 1950s High School Grads

CNSNEWS.com ^ | 12/19/02 | Scott Hogenson

[kattracks]

(CNSNews.com) - The college seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge than the high school graduates of almost half a century ago, according to the results of a new study.

The average of correct responses for modern college seniors on a series of questions assessing "general cultural knowledge" was 53.5 percent compared with 54.5 percent of high school graduates in 1955, according to a survey by Zogby International.

The Zogby poll of 401 randomly selected college seniors was conducted in April for the Princeton, N.J.-based National Association of Scholars and released Wednesday.

"The average amount of knowledge that college seniors had was just about the same as the average amount of knowledge that high school graduates had back in the 1950s," said NAS President Stephen H. Balch.

Balch noted that the high school grads of half a century ago performed better than today's college seniors on history questions, while contemporary students fared better on questions covering art and literature, with no appreciable difference on geography questions.

The questions asked in the April poll by Zogby were virtually the same as questions asked by the Gallup Organization in 1955, with a few questions being slightly modified to reflect history.

"The questions were just about identical, as identical as we could make them," said Balch. "In most cases, they were absolutely identical."

Balch attributed the stagnation of performance on general knowledge questions to several factors, including a decreased emphasis on general knowledge in high school, placing colleges and universities in the position of having to fill academic gaps among students entering college.

"This is fundamental knowledge that everyone should have and if your students are being admitted without it, then that only reinforces the need for you to take general education seriously," Balch said.

But Balch said he didn't consider such actions to be remedial in nature, noting that "the remedial problems have to do with students not being able to write or read at the eighth grade level and still getting into college. There are many institutions in which that's a difficulty. You have people who just don't have the skills let alone the knowledge."

Even though the NAS study raises questions about the caliber of general education offered in high schools, colleges and universities also bear some responsibility, Balch said.

"I think it probably has a lot to do with the dumbing down of curriculum, both at the college and high school level," said Balch. "It looks good, certainly, to say 'more people are graduating from college,' but is there any real intellectual yield from it?"

Also part of the problem is that many colleges are placing less emphasis on liberal arts education in favor of more specialized education geared toward specific career paths, which Balch said isn't necessarily in the best interest of students or society.

"I think these results, which don't seem to show a great deal of value-added in the general cultural knowledge domain - I think these results are quite interesting and disappointing," said Balch. "We would hope that the college students of today would have done a good deal better than the high school students of the past."

Also contributing to the trend is an easing of college admissions standards. While Balch doesn't advocate a return to standards requiring competency in Greek or Latin, he does say colleges should "insist that the student coming have basic areas of knowledge."

A solid background in general knowledge, Balch said, is "very important both for good citizenship and, for many people at least, for a happy and interesting life," by providing students with what Balch called "cultural furniture that allows them to be better citizens."

Click here to read the general knowledge questions.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

[OldEagle]

You might very well be correct, but can you give an example?

[SamAdams76]

You might very well be correct, but can you give an example?

Sure thing.

I wrote in an earlier reply:

"And what did the students of the 1950s end up doing with their lives? Smoking dope, protesting the war and listening to acid rock. Well, many of them did, anyway."

And you wrote:

WRONG AGAIN!
NEVER TOUCHED DRUGS. DID DO KOREA AND VIETNAM.

I then questioned your reading comprehension because if you read my quote, I clearly qualified "Well, many of them did, anyway."

So just because you were one that didn't, doesn't make me wrong.

I got a lot of replies about the 1950s statement. Many people get confused and think that the hippies came through school in the 1960s. The fact is, the hippies of the 1960s were mostly already in college or even out of college, which means that many of them were going through school during the 1950s.

[OldEagle]

If you had put a question mark at the end of the sentence fragment "Smoking dope, protesting the war and listening to acid rock.", I might have understood that you meant it as a question. As is, I took it as the intended answer to the previous question and saw the next sentence added as an afterthought.
Sometimes reading comprehension depends on the writing.
Do you agree?