One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.” I have never actually seen evidence to back that contention up, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your wonderful higher education system in America.” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.

On October 2, 2006, The Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey entitled “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of 2-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of 4-year colleges as “excellent.”

Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor socialism and interventionism. How was the American university transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for socialist-inspired culture and politics?

As recently as the early 1950s, the typical American university professor held social and political views quite similar to those of the general population. Today — well, you’ve all heard the jokes that circulated after the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, how the only place in the world where Marxists were still thriving was the Harvard political science department.

Hamilton College has changed its mind and turned down plans for a $3.6 million center studying the achievements and failures of Western civilization.

The proposed Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization, funded by a gift from an alumnus, was announced in October, but in late November the college reversed course. According to a statement from the college, “Hamilton College has announced that the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be established at this time due to a lack of consensus about institutional oversight of the Center as a Hamilton program.”

Concern that American college students may not be learning much during their years in school is not new; nor is it confined to think tanks like the Pope Center. Back in 1999, the Pew Charitable Trusts made a grant to Indiana University to develop a means of probing the question of student achievement. What emerged was the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a program designed to measure the extent to which students are active participants in their education. If there is evidence that students are really engaged in their college work, that is at least indicative of educational progress – and vice versa.

NSSE accumulates data by sending a questionnaire to a large number of college freshmen and seniors. For the 2006 survey, more than one million were sent to students in the US and Canada. The schools those students attend range from the most prestigious to the least. Institutions, however, have to choose to participate and not all do. In North Carolina, all of the UNC campuses participated, along with 24 of the independent colleges and universities. (The two best-known of the independents, Duke and Wake Forest, chose not to participate.) Results are based on approximately 260,000 randomly selected responses.