Returning to the ISI Civic Literacy Survey, consider:

The highest Freshman scores were secured at:

Georgetown

Princeton

Harvard

Dartmouth

Yale

Williams

This isn’t so surprising, as these schools attract bright students. What of the highest Senior scores? Most of the usual suspects again appear:

Princeton

Harvard

Dartmouth

Yale

Williams

But also:

Grove City

Ah, so civic literacy improved at a few of America’s finest universities? Hardly. Princeton, Harvard, and Dartmouth made marginal increases between their Freshman and Senior scores, while scores at Yale and Williams actually fell from Freshmen to Seniors. (Georgetown fell off of the list). They were still better, comparatively, than other scores, but this offers little cause for congratulation. Good news! Four years at Dartmouth may leave the average undergraduate’s high school civics education intact! If colleges are dedicated to simply preserving high school knowledge then we can consider these schools real exemplars. Theirs is at least a better performance than a number of their elite peers; the greatest decline in scores came at:

Duke

Brown

Cornell

UC Berkeley

Johns Hopkins

No comment. Moving on, there are institutions at which students learned something (yes, it sounds suspicious to me also). Consider those most improved:

Rhodes College

Colorado State

Calvin

Grove City

University of Colorado, Boulder

One of them, Grove City, increased its scores so greatly as to rise from the mid-range to the top of the performance list. The others all yielded respectable increases. How so? I’m not sure.

One item of note is that Rhodes, Calvin, and Grove City all boast substantial core curricula. Those three are also Christian colleges–and I had always suspected that civic literacy smacked of theocracy.