Education: Students & Stomach Pumps

Because Pennsylvania has more colleges than any other state (65), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching chose it as the subject of an inquiry to determine how much young men & women learn in college.* In four years it investigated 49 colleges, examined thousands of students. The findings, issued in the Foundation’s annual report, were ready in time for learned and vocal Albert Edward Wiggam in a radio speech last week to summarize as follows:

“At least one-third of the students had learned nothing at all, and about one-half had learned very little.”

Added Columbia’s loud Professor Walter Boughton Pitkin, historian of Stupidity (TIME, April 4), co-summarizer: “The best thing which the richest, most influential and most ambitious graduates of American colleges during the past 40 years have been able to achieve is to send 127,000,000 people into bankruptcy and mess up all of North America.”

In 1928 the Foundation gave to several thousand college seniors a twelve-hour, two-day test on a series of 3,400 items drawn from subjects taught in a liberal arts college. Only the 4,500 students who subsequently were graduated were considered. In 1930 another test was prepared for sophomores, more comprehensive, designed to measure such knowledge as might be expected to increase from year to year. In some colleges this test was given to all four classes.

“The peak of literary knowledge,” reported Carnegie, “both of words and of books, is apparently reached in the freshman year; 53% of the college seniors tested in English literature and vocabulary stood lower than the median freshman. . . . Mathematics exhibits a consistent backward movement. . . . The sophomore group has the advantage in the intelligence scores. … In general science 39% of the freshmen did better than the median senior; in foreign literature about 24%; in fine arts 36%; in general history 38%. In the test as a whole 30% of the seniors were below the freshman median, while about the same proportion of freshmen outdid the median senior. The heretofore pardonable and undisproved conviction of the fourth-year man that any senior must of necessity be wiser than any freshman should apparently undergo revision. Either the knowledge has simply not been retained or it has never been acquired.”

In English, the Foundation found, “students drop the study as freshmen, and literary knowledge tends to disappear. … As for vocabulary . . . the effect of college . . . appears to be almost negligible and in some cases positively injurious. … To a senior with average score the word benighted means weary, recreant means diverting and spurious means foamy. Possibly the fact that he takes the word assiduous to mean foolish may help explain his case.”

Carnegie concluded: “With few and very recent exceptions, American secondary and college education . . . has insisted on estimating its results by measuring the immediate intake of raw material and laying but little emphasis on the evidences of assimilation as shown by permanence of acquisition. . . . Tests and examinations . . . appear to deserve the ribald comment that a medical student once made to William James to the effect that he saw in them nothing but a periodical application of the stomach pump.”

*Part of an exhaustive inquiry into the entire educational system, begun in Pennsylvania four years ago, still far from finished. Specific school children have been singled out, are being watched through high school and college.