About What Will They Learn?^®

What Will They Learn?® evaluates over 1,100 general education programs annually so that high school counselors, students, and parents know, in advance, which institutions offer rigorous liberal arts-oriented general education programs.

Mission:

We aim to encourage institutions to strengthen their general education requirements so that students graduate better prepared for the workforce, ready to participate in their communities as informed citizens, and acquainted with our cultural and intellectual inheritance. We also work to educate families, high school counselors, and educators about the importance of students selecting colleges or universities with a strong core curriculum.

Reasoned debate and free inquiry are the cornerstone of a quality collegiate education. That is why we work to spotlight universities that have adopted the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression as well as academic programs that foster intellectual community in pursuit of liberal learning and a free and open marketplace of ideas.

Vision:

We envision a future where American colleges and universities have strong liberal arts education programs, campuses foster a free and open marketplace of ideas, and families have the resources necessary to choose the right school for the right reasons.

About Us:

What Will They Learn?® is an initiative of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a higher education policy nonprofit dedicated to academic excellence, academic freedom, and governance accountability.

History:

Founded in 1995, ACTA is the only organization working with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold academic standards, and safeguard free expression and open exchange of ideas on campus. Our network consists of alumni and trustees from nearly 1,300 colleges and universities, including over 23,000 current board members. Our quarterly newsletter, Inside Academe, reaches more than 13,000 readers.

ACTA's What Will They Learn?® project is a survey of general education programs that began in 2009 as a part of ACTA's commitment to fostering academic excellence on college campuses. The initial evaluation assessed the core curriculum at 100 of the nation's leading colleges and universities. This year will mark the the thirteenth edition and our annual report, which has grown to include over 1,130 institutions.

Former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis explains the value of general education and how WhatWillTheyLearn.com can help high school counselors, students, and parents make informed choices.

Letter from Former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis

It’s been years since I’ve seen the sort of Chinese restaurant menu that required choosing one dish from Column A and one from Column B. It didn’t give you complete freedom, but it was a lot of fun to join your dinner companions in making crazy combinations of things that didn’t actually go that well together.

Those menus may be gone from restaurants, but they are alive and well at our colleges—not in the cafeteria, but in most course catalogs. There, the requirements that are supposed to make sure your kids receive a well-rounded education often simply call for one course in the humanities, one course in social science, and so on. On some campuses, it doesn’t matter at all what courses are chosen, as long as they are in the right categories. Other schools limit the courses so that they meet some special criteria, but there is little sense of how each individual course relates to the others.

The venerable and honorable notion of “general education” has, in other words, been reduced to a game. Students have to work their way through a vast menu of general education requirements and do their best to find courses that fit the various categories as well as their schedules.

This is deplorable indeed. At its best, general education is about the unity of knowledge, not about distributed knowledge. Not about spreading courses around, but about making connections between different ideas. Not about the freedom to combine random ingredients, but about joining an ancient lineage of the learned and wise. And it has a goal, too: producing an enlightened, self-reliant citizenry, pluralistic and diverse but united by democratic values.

It is in that spirit that I welcome you to WhatWillTheyLearn.com and urge you to use it as a resource. If I may, let me draw your particular attention to one area. 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. government or history 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?

With good guidance, students can get the holistic educational experience almost anywhere. But good guidance is hard to come by, and these days, the menus don’t help very much. That’s why I hope this resource will help you find out which of the colleges you and your children are considering are taking care to provide an education . . . and which are just offering a menu.