American Colleges Under-Serve Minority Students.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. eloquently argued that the civil rights movement was rooted in our founding documents and key events of our history. American colleges today, however, are not helping minorities learn this heritage.
Someone visiting Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, King once observed, would naturally assume that the brutal segregationists running that city were woefully ignorant of America’s history and institutions. “You might have concluded that here was a city which had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber,” he wrote, “a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools.”
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
To claim this inheritance, however, young Americans must first learn what it is. How tragically ironic it would be if the future leaders of American minority communities were to graduate from colleges today just as ill-educated about their country’s history and traditions as the leaders of segregationist Birmingham appeared to be in 1963. Unfortunately, the results of the American civic literacy exam provide evidence that this may be happening.
| CIVIC LEARNING BY RACE AND ETHNICITY | |||
| Characteristic | Freshman Average | Senior Average | Value Added |
| White | 51.7% | 56.8% | +5.1%* |
| Minority (Non-White) | 47.4% | 48.2% | +0.8% |
| Asian | 52.3% | 51.3% | -1.0% |
| Black | 41.6% | 42.5% | +0.9% |
| Hispanic | 43.8% | 45.5% | +1.7% |
| Multi-racial | 49.3% | 52.0% | +2.8%* |
| * The difference between the freshman and senior means is statistically significant with confidence of 95% or greater. | |||
On average, college seniors who identified themselves as belonging to a minority group (Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Multi-racial) answered less than half the exam questions correctly (48.2%) and gained less than one point (0.80) in overall civic knowledge during their first three years in college. White students, by comparison, gained an average of 5.1 points overall during their first three years of college, or 4.3 points more than minorities. Nevertheless, some minority students did extremely well on this exam. The single highest score in the survey, for example, was achieved by a minority student.
Minority students at Ivy League colleges lost 0.85 point; in contrast, minorities at other colleges gained 1.51 points.
American colleges have done a great job in opening the door of opportunity to minority students. The question now is whether by failing to advance civic learning among these students they are also failing to equip them to help keep the door of liberty open for future generations.