This makes me sad: the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has created a website asking "What will they learn?" as a counterweight to all those criteria used by popular lists by U.S. News and Kiplinger's. (See Ashley Thorne's review.) Their seven required core courses are excellent, particularly because they include economics:

To determine whether institutions have a solid core curriculum, we defined success in each of the seven subject areas outlined as follows:

• Composition.
• Literature.
• Foreign Language.
• U.S. Government or History.
• Economics.
• Mathematics.
• Natural or Physical Science.

Good list; I deleted the explanations of the seven courses, but you should read them. No school they surveyed had all seven, and of those that made their A-list requiring six of seven, only one -- West Point -- requires economics. The agony!

If you like that list and have a child close to deciding where to go to school, you'll see one school that surprises you: University of Arkansas. At $15,338 for out-of-state tuition, it appears to be a bargain compared to the others. If you're reading from UArk, send me some info -- Littlest is a sophomore.

SCSU would get a D as I read the criteria. Sounds terrible ... but Carleton gets a D too. The University of Minnesota does better than I thought it would.

Labels: economics, higher education