[lbo-talk] College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds....not really though...

Bryan Atinsky bryan at alt-info.org
Wed Feb 10 20:09:48 PST 2010


Matthias Wasser wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Get down to the comment 25, Doug1943: ``The people who sponsored this
>> research, the ISI, are indeed a conservative organization, and this
>> should have been mentioned.'' Damned right it should have been.
>>
>
>
> They did mention it: "an independent group with a tradition-minded view of
> issues..." It should have been in the lede, though, assuming there's
> something newsworthy to the story at all.
>
Yes, but while they did mention the "tradition-minded" view of the center, they more or less took their undefined "civics knowledge" at face value in the Chronicle's reporting of the "research" (if you can call it that).

That is shoddy reporting.

"Previous surveys have found that, in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge. According to the institute's 2008 report, <http://chronicle.com/article/Most-College-Graduates-Flun/1357/> based on a survey of 2,500, people whose highest level of educational attainment was a bachelor's degree correctly answered 57 percent of the questions, on average. That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade, according to the survey's authors."



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