“Many studies have shown that our college graduates are ignorant of the basic principles on which our government runs. For starters, most cannot identify the purpose of the First Amendment, what Reconstruction was, or the historical context of the Voting Rights Act. If you peruse this website, you will see why: the vast majority of our colleges have made a course on the broad themes of U.S. history or government optional. This is especially dangerous in America, where nothing holds us together except our democratic principles. If universities don’t pass them down, our children will not inherit our nationhood genetically. They can receive that heritage only through learning. That’s one key reason that during the college search you must ask: what will they learn?”
I was happy to see economics among their core subjects, along with composition, literature, foreign language, US history, mathematics and science.
I have long been saying that education in economics is severely lacking in this country and I think it’s why so many Americans are so easily led astray politically. I firmly believe that if people had a better understanding of economics, they wouldn’t choose such foolish political policies.
With that in mind, I eagerly dived in to see what the website had to say about economics. The results frankly did not surprise me: economic education is almost non-existent. Of the more than 700 schools that were graded, only 25 required their students to learn economics - 25 schools, not 25 percent of schools. In fact the 25 schools that made the list make up just 3.5% of the schools that were graded. Of the seven categories studied, economics was by far the most underrepresented category, with only 25 schools.
So, by this informal, unscientific survey, we can extrapolate this to say that only 3.5% of college students are being required to learn economics. And of those that are required, the bar is set pretty low. A school qualifies if it requires “A course covering basic economic principles, preferably an introductory micro- or macroeconomics course taught by faculty from the economics or business departments.” Economics is such a broad and deep subject that requiring students to simply be introduced to it in no way ensures that they actually understand economics. So even with the bar set so low, only 25 out of more than 700 schools clear it. What a shame.
Some other interesting facts that the website revealed: virtually every notable college or university in this country is absent from the economics list. You won’t find Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford on the list. Perhaps the only notable school to make the list is the Air Force Academy. Now, of course this doesn’t mean that those schools fail to teach quality economics (one of the greatest economists in the country, in my opinion, teaches at Harvard – Greg Mankiw); it just means that these great schools don’t find economics important enough to be required.
Another tidbit I found interesting (and not surprising either I might add), was that the average grade for the schools in the economics category was “B+”, while the overall average for schools was probably a “C-“ at best (there is no overall or average ranking on the website. I just perused the grades and guessed at what an average is. Also, there are no “+” or “-“ given either, just a straight letter grade).
The lowest graded school in the economics category is a “B” and nine of the 16 “A” schools are in the economics category. The economics category is the only one without a “C” school or lower. Since 9 out of 25 schools received an “A”, the economics category had an “A” rate of 36%, which trounced the overall “A” rate of just 2.2%.
While this website is mostly just for fun and no real conclusions can be drawn from it, it does expose the critical lack of requiring economic education in our higher learning institutions. Also, it’s no surpise that the majority of schools receiving an “A” ranking recognized the importance of requiring students to learn economics.
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