For comparison purposes, a number of these metrics are placed side-by-side with those of other baccalaureate and master's level institutions. The federal government has of late imposed all kinds of special regulations on for-profit providers of higher education: it has yet to hold non-profit institutions to the same rules.

ACTA's What Will They Learn? project, however, shows at a glance that many non-profit, fully-accredited institutions graduate less than 30% of their undergraduates, and the vast majority so far refuses to administer a nationally-normed assessment of core collegiate skills and disclose the results.

The American public would be better served if the U.S. Department of Education would level the playing field and apply the same regulations and standards to all providers of higher education. And what exactly are accreditors doing for the American public, when they approve institutions that consistently fail to rise to this challenge from the University of Phoenix?

Michael Poliakoff

With that pledge, in 1995, Herbert Wiley Vaughan, "Wiley" to his friends, became one of ACTA's first supporters. From that point, there was no looking back. Wiley and ACTA became a team - in a campaign that has grown stronger, thanks to Wiley's extraordinary counsel and support. Wiley was a supporter - yes. But he was so much more. He and his wife - a talented artist - brought energy, creativity, and thoughtfulness to their work and their avocations.

First, as an ACTA charter member, then as a founding member of our distinguished donor societies, and a leader of ACTA's Donors Working Group, Wiley set the example for ACTA's abiding philosophy: identify a problem and take action to solve it. That's why, after Yale refused to establish a Western Civilization program funded by Lee Bass, Wiley believed it essential to show donors how they could exert a beneficial influence on some of the disturbing trends in higher education. Thanks to Wiley and others, ACTA created the Fund for Academic Renewal to provide "micro" advice for donors, and followed up with a publication to help donors target their gifts, The Intelligent Donor's Guide to College Giving.

How appropriate, then, that in our second edition, published more than a decade after our first meeting, we showcased Wiley - whose intelligent giving and visionary plans have incomparably contributed to the restoration of academic excellence on our campuses.

Herbert Wiley Vaughan supports higher education in a variety of ways, and his gifts offer an example of intelligent giving. Before making his first gift, Vaughan consulted a "faculty friend" - a former associate who was on the Princeton faculty. The professor pointed out that many senior scholars, who were steeped in traditional learning and were remarkable for their intellectual integrity and commitment to students, are retiring. This unfortunate fact is coupled with the reality that most new support often goes to professors who are caught up in the intellectual fashions of the moment. As a result of this understanding, Vaughan established a trust to support younger scholars who take more traditional approaches. This trust will ensure that the best academic traditions continue in the next generation.

In 2007, Vaughan noticed another need in higher education - a deeper understanding of the founding principles and core doctrines of our system of government. He gave his alma mater, Harvard Law School, another gift. This time, his donation instituted a new program, called the Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture Series, which invites intellectuals and public figures every other year to discuss the U.S. Constitution and its doctrines. United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the inaugural lecture in this series, addressing a packed house on the topic of originalism in constitutional law.

Two aspects of Vaughan's latest gift make it especially noteworthy. First, it is a two-pronged program. In the years when the lectures are not held, Vaughan's gift funds an academic activity sponsored by the Federalist Society chapter. Because both Harvard Law School and the Federalist Society are regularly called upon to oversee the designated programs, they must stay focused on the continuing applications of the restricted gift. Second, Vaughan stipulated in his gift agreement that a statement outlining his reasons for funding the lectures must be read before each lecture. Requiring this statement each year will help both the school and the audience focus on Vaughn's intent. Vaughan used these two mechanisms to ensure that his intent would be followed when he gave this gift. Because of Vaughan's dedication to intelligent giving, students at Harvard Law School now hear and engage perspectives outside the classroom that enhance what they learn inside it. ACTA has lost a great friend - Herbert Wiley Vaughan - an inspiration and supporter from the very start. A charter member of the Society of Fellows and the Donors Working Group, Wiley shared ACTA's interest in quality education and adherence to donor intent.

Time and time again, Wiley came to the front lines in ACTA's fight for academic freedom and excellence. And in all cases, he modeled seriousness of purpose, professionalism, good judgment, and gentlemanliness. ACTA benefited from Wiley's friendship and wise counsel. Wiley, in every way, embodied fine character, great achievement and high public purpose. All of us who believe in quality education and the robust exchange of ideas are in Wiley's debt. We have lost a great champion of quality higher education and a good friend.

Anne D. Neal

"Knowledge is important, but it is equally important to work on public problems that help democracy," said Carol Schneider, the AAC&U president, thus undercutting a crucial part of her agenda. AAC&U makes a "clarion call," and gets organizations to "pledg[e] to take civic learning to another level," and encourages colleges to make it "an integral component" in college study.

But the rhetoric runs the danger of ultimately signifying nothing. In contrast to AAC&U, some schools went right to the core to ensure knowledge of our nation and its institutions of government. Hunter College, for example, requires a course that "introduces portions of the history of the United States covering periods of time sufficiently long to reveal the historical dynamic and bring understanding of the historical contexts that have created our social and political institutions."

Indeed a few states, such as Texas, Georgia, and Nevada established such requirements in statute. Sadly, however, ACTA's study of core requirements at over 1000 colleges and universities reveals that only 20% now require a foundational course in American history or American institutions of government. The rest either have no requirement that specifically address American history or have a distributional requirement so broad as to be meaningless, something like "America on Film: Performance and Culture" or "Country Music" or "Jazz."

Instead of holding national conferences on civic engagement, AAC&U could do immensely more good for civic literacy by encouraging the AAC&U membership, in the clearest of terms, to walk the walk of civic literacy. Make it a required course. Simply require it.

The choice of major is important and college trustees should make sound choices about which academic programs deserve funding and which ones should be discontinued. But the Georgetown Center's advice is incomplete: core collegiate requirements are also crucial for employment, to say nothing of citizenship. Employers have long been complaining that many graduates of both two and four year institutions have poor writing skills and lack many other characteristics of excellence that they want to see. They note the growing need for other core skills, including foreign language.

For the rest of the explanation of why college graduates, even in a recession, are having a harder time finding jobs than they should, turn to Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. When 36% of the graduates of the class of 2009 show - at most - minimal growth in such core collegiate skills as critical reasoning and expository writing, are we surprised that they don't find jobs?

ACTA's core curriculum project, www.whatwilltheylearn.com gives the rest of the explanation for why our costly higher education system serves the interests of students and the economy so poorly. Of seven key subjects that every student needs, regardless of major - mathematics, natural science, expository writing, foreign language, literature, American history or government, and basic economics - 61% of our colleges and universities require three or less, and 29% require between zero and two. Whether the student majored in engineering, architecture, or comparative literature, an education without a solid core, even from a prestigious institution, runs the danger of being a very expensive junk bond.

-Michael Poliakoff
Vice President of Policy

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What are your thoughts? Email your comments to info@goacta.org.

A 1937 graduate of Yale College and 1941 graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Berry epitomized the engaged and thoughtful alumnus, serving as the secretary of the Yale Class of 1937 for more than three decades. But Rynn's affection for his alma mater was not unquestioning. Indeed, he subscribed to the notion articulated by philosopher and professor Charles Anderson that: "The graduates of the university are members of the guild ... [T]hey are competent to participate, as citizens, in its affairs." And participate, Rynn did.

Over the years, Rynn worked to enhance and expand Yale's exemplary Directed Studies program. He sought adherence to donor intent - a matter close to his heart after Yale's return of $20 million to Lee Bass, the son of a beloved classmate. He was also profoundly interested in the return of ROTC to Yale and pleased to gather support from former president George H.W. Bush and the late Sargent Shriver - who were also Yale alumni.

Rynn was a dedicated supporter of excellence - in academics as well as sports. But more than that, he was a gentleman and a dear friend. His enthusiasm for education and support for ACTA's mission will continue to motivate us. Cheers!

Anne D. Neal

Sadly, the picture is just as bleak for college students. According to Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in the first two years of college, 45 percent "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning." After all four years, 36 percent still didn't demonstrate any significant improvement, as measured by performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

Students simply are not getting the basic foundational knowledge they need in order to succeed, and employers know it. According to a report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, fully 63 percent of executives agree that too many recent college grads simply do not have the skills to be successful in today's economy.

Our latest edition of What Will They Learn? shows why. Ninety-five percent of colleges do not require students to take even a single course in economics. Eighty percent do not require a single survey course in U.S. history or government. And only 15 percent of schools require students to take intermediate-level foreign language.

We need to break the cycle of underpreparation that pervades too much of K-12 and higher education. The need for college graduates who are prepared for career and community must be reflected in sound curricular standards in higher education, which, in turn, must be reflected in serious requirements for entering college and rigorous preparation at the K-12 level for college or vocation.

Paraphrasing from former Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti, that's what Creed C. Black wrote in a Knight Commission report two decades ago - long before the scandals that rocked Penn State and other institutions around the country. If the situation was that bad then, just imagine what he would say today.

The quote surfaced in a commentary by William Friday, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina system, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Friday calls for a reexamination of the collegiate sports world. The exponential growth of certain sports programs, he said, have caused an arrangement which "can lead to entertainment imperatives taking precedence over those of education."

Friday summed up the thrust of his argument with a message that mirrors that of ACTA.

"There is a sound and important place for intercollegiate sports in academic institutions. It is time for those directly responsible to exert strong leadership and bring an immediate end to the shameful exploitation and abuse now so destructive of these worthy and essential institutions. Thoughtful Americans expect no less from trustees and university leaders."

Friday also called for increased transparency, including requiring intercollegiate sports programs to outline where funding comes from and how it is spent.

ACTA supports Friday's reminder to colleges that their prime focus must be education.

But take one look at the state of higher education today. Tuition costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation. Student debt topped $1 trillion this year, surpassing credit card debt. Yet despite all this, the New York Times reported that the median base salary of presidents at private institutions actually increased by 2.8 percent to $294,489. At public universities, presidential pay rose 11.5 percent over the last four years, settling comfortably at $259,238.

That doesn't count the perks: vehicles, housing allowances and travel expenses. All in all, some university presidents make millions.

Take, for example, Constantine Papadakis. He's the president of Drexel University and he raked in a total of $4.9 million in 2009. William R. Brody? $3.8 million. The list goes on and on.

That's why it was so unnerving when David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told the New York Times that there's "just a small pool of candidates who possess the skill set that is required and are willing to take on the stressful 24/7 nature of the position."

I'm afraid that we can no longer do what we've always done, because this culture of rising institutional costs - at the expense of the taxpayer and the debt-riddled students - must stop. We need fresh and innovative presidents who are willing to face the challenges of tomorrow, not just pass the buck until tomorrow. We need to rethink the current models and cut costs before we bury our young graduates under piles of debt from which they cannot emerge.

It's time to drain the "small pool of candidates" and open presidential searches up to real innovators. It's sink or swim - and the heavy loans we're saddling our young graduates with may just pull them under.

ACTA believes that a strong core provides a foundation for life-long learning, or as Murphy eloquently phrases it, "develop[s] that broad and deep reservoir of relatively permanent knowledge that will underwrite whatever expertise they choose to later acquire." Colleges must be careful to avoid becoming instruments for funneling students into overly-specialized professions without giving them such a knowledge base. In the first 25 years of employment a young person is likely to experience nearly 11 career changes, make hyper-specialization a risky and irresponsible proposition.

There is certainly a place for highly specialized or niche courses, but Murphy correctly cautions professors not to assume that undergraduate students have accumulated the underpinning of "factual knowledge and tacit intuition" that they themselves possess. The passing of time sees the value of knowing fundamental collegiate skills and knowledge undiminished. It is precisely for this reason that ACTA emphasizes a strong core as the lynchpin of a complete undergraduate education.

ACTA's core curriculum project, www.whatwilltheylearn.com finds - alarmingly - that only 20% of our colleges and universities require a foundational course in U.S. History or Government, let alone a systematic study of Western civilization. Educators and policymakers, please take note.

Michael Poliakoff is ACTA's vice president of policy.

Here they go again. The faculty at Whitman are up in arms, deeply concerned that people they don't like are giving money to enrich the lives of students at their college. Princeton's Andrew Ross expressed a view all-too-common among faculty when he said that he wanted "direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling class." And, all too often, such mentors don't want viewpoints that might prompt debate or a real exchange of ideas.

Philanthropists like the Kochs refuse to accept such a status quo and offer programs that regularly challenge the orthodoxies of the professoriate -- with topnotch speakers and new perspectives. They address the lack of intellectual diversity that, sadly, some faculty find congenial. Until the faculty put their own prejudices aside and put students first, they have no cause for complaint against philanthropists who give of their own resources to create the academic dialogue that is the birthright of the academy. Should the Koch Foundation ask for student emails as they did? Perhaps not. But that's a problem that Whitman College can readily fix without straight-arming the academic opportunities that the Kochs offer.

After years of runaway tuition increases and the grim calculus of a recession whose effects are now extending into a fourth year, they see the ever-rising cost of going to college as unsustainable. In 2009, ACTA and the Illinois Policy Institute criticized Illinois public universities for a history of massive tuition increases. Then Southern Illinois University Chancellor Sam Goldman, President Glenn Poshard, and the Trustees froze tuition and fees in 2010-2011 and increased the rate only modestly the following year.

Chancellor Goldman stated: "I think this decision, which says zero increase, says we understand the situation everybody is in." Increasingly, schools are freezing tuition rates.

Most recently, several private colleges -- including Sewanee and the University of Charleston -- have lowered their tuition rates, as seen in The New York Times, and the Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here).

These actions represent real leadership in American higher education. America is #1 in higher ed spending per student among the industrialized nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, coming in at more than twice the average expenditure for those nations. Yet, our results are far below average in terms of student proficiency and skills. The answer is not more spending and higher tuitions. It's judicious and prudent use of the limited funds available.

Poliakoff shed light on so-called "boutique courses" which contribute very little to the educational foundation of students. Despite alarming gaps in the knowledge of college graduates, these niche classes seem to be gaining traction at some institutions.

For the ostensible death agonies of the humanities, Nussbaum would like us to put the gravamen on an external enemy rather than colleges and universities. But Pogo, not Professor Nussbaum has it right. The enemy is us.

Item: Hamilton College, whose annual tuition and fees stand at $41,280, offers, intra alia, "Video Game Nation," a humanities course that, "[i]nvestigates how to critically interpret and analyze video games and the roles they play in visual and popular culture, and how to test the application of these approaches to various issues in gaming and digital media culture more generally. Topics and themes include genre and aesthetics, the game industry, spectatorship, play, narrative, immersion, gender, race, militarism, violence and labor. (Writing-intensive.)"

Item: Vassar College (at $43,190) presents as a First-Year Writing Seminar "Hip Hop and Critical Citizenship."

Item: Furman University (at $38,088) offers "Clothing as Self Expression" and "Beer and Society."

I could go on. You can find courses like these by the dozens in college catalogs, often fulfilling "core" requirements. Did Corporate America, or Capitol Hill foist this nonsense on well-meaning liberal arts colleges? No, these are the self-inflicted wounds of faculty who would rather ride the hobby horses of their narrow specialties than provide the kind of general education that all students need to become independent, analytical thinkers.

Professor Bauerlein properly takes note of the humanities at West Point. Every one of the military service academies requires a survey of literature. The liberal arts, including the humanities, still thrive where faculties are willing to structure the curriculum in answer to the question, "what does it mean to be an educated person," rather than "what’s in it for me or my department." Check out the “A” list on www.whatwilltheylearn.com to see how it is done, often on limited budgets. 36% of the Class of 2009 is back home with their parents and even more are mired in student loan debt that their poorly designed baccalaureate degrees leave
them ill-equipped to repay.

Considering that we outspend per college student every industrialized nation in the world,
we have a right to higher standards and better results, and it is no surprise that a lot of taxpayers, parents, and students are darkly eyeing the Ivory Tower as the next site to occupy.

Often supported by the faculty who enjoy teaching these classes, ACTA worries that these niche classes are elbowing robust, foundational courses in key subjects off of students' class schedules.

"I value liberal arts education because you're really getting a broad skill set. And I think one of the things that's important to be able to do in life is learn how to read and write - write really well and articulate your views," Mrs. Obama said on the campus of Georgetown University.

The First Lady's remarks were made during a question and answer session of College Immersion Day at Georgetown by a student from Anacostia High School.

Her statement syncs with ACTA's belief that a strong core curriculum is pivotal for a student's education. In ACTA's What Will They Learn? study, only 19 out of more than 1000 colleges and universities nationwide require at least six of the seven core subjects in the study: literature, composition, math, science, foreign language, economics and American history/government. The First Lady is right that a liberal arts education offers an essential foundation for students' education.

Oberlin College's latest media exposure centers around a new website designed by two Oberlin employees. The website, whythef---shouldichooseoberlin.com, encourages students and alumni to voice their love of Oberlin through obscenity. Some may find the foul language amusing, to which the best one can say is that there is no accounting for taste. But the website invites a more profound question: exactly what is an Oberlin experience supposed to accomplish after four years and $41,577 per year in tuition and fees?

Some of the blog posts do, in their unique way, extol the benefits of Oberlin's academic climate: "[I chose Oberlin because] of the f-ing legendary Professor Dawson." Most, however, advertise aspects of the college at best tangentially related to learning. For example "Because we have a huge all campus party on the main green with DJs and beer and crazy ass circus people every f-ing Friday afternoon that it is warm enough to be outside." Or: "We have a kick-ass f-ing Quidditch team."

Terrific: Come to a prestigious liberal arts college where, for $41,577 per annum, students simultaneously play fictitious sports based on children's fantasy novels and express themselves with four-letter words that typically don't require an advanced degree.

The college has for all intents and purposes signed on to this - the site's architects and administrators work in Oberlin's social and digital media departments, and Oberlin's vice president for communications told Inside Higher Ed that the school would not officially endorse it because "the site would lose some if its charm if it were." Indeed.

What is Oberlin saying to young men and women about the purpose of college in general or the prestigious Oberlin in particular? This messaging, however attractive to its naive target demographic, creates a perception that college amounts to an extended summer camp. If the goal of liberal arts education is preparation for a productive and intellectually engaging life or for upholding Oberlin's tradition of leadership and service, that message is completely lost in institutionally-endorsed adolescence.

Edward Shils, distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought saw the task of the university as the "discovery and teaching of truths about serious and important things." During these challenging times, when many worthy students have to abandon college plans for want of funds, Oberlin - and all schools - need to give up childish things and their elite frivolity. The nation needs leaders, and the duty of colleges is not to amuse but to educate students for the tasks before them.