ACTA's What Will They Learn?® (WWTL) project is designed to help students choose the best college or university for them. The printed report and its online companion WhatWillTheyLearn.com represent the only assessment of U.S. colleges and universities that focuses on what schools are actually teaching. This report assigns grades to over 1,130…

"What Will They Learn?" has been documenting for the last 13 years the crisis of weak core curriculum requirements. In addition to helping students choose the right college for the right reasons, American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) works with college and university leaders on campuses around the country to strengthen curricula…

In this 12th edition of its flagship annual survey of college general education curricula, "What Will They Learn?," American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) shines a light on the wide disparity in academic standards at institutions of higher learning across the country. "What Will They Learn?" reviews the core curricula…

Maine is blessed with universities that have records of significant achievement. The seven campuses of the University of Maine System (UMS) together educated over 23,000 students (full-time equivalent) during the past year. But for good reason, in recent years public confidence in higher education throughout the nation has fallen. Half of the…

This report examines Idaho's undergraduate-degree-granting colleges and universities. The authors focus on what students are learning (the curriculum), whether the marketplace of ideas is vibrant (intellectual diversity), how the universities are run (governance), and what a college education costs (affordability). In each case, the authors…

This document is an important companion to the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) report "Getting Serious About High School Graduation." Together, they make powerful statements to policymakers and education leaders about the problems in high schools and what can be done to fix them. Teachers, policymakers, and parents have long agreed that…

In an effort to infuse professional and preprofessional academic programs with liberal arts learning, this project at the University of Baltimore (Maryland) resulted in the establishment of a required liberal arts core curriculum for upper division students. The project provided funding for three activities: interdisciplinary team teaching of the…

This booklet describes the College Core Curriculum (CCC) program recently initiated at Phineas Banning Senior High School in Los Angeles, which is designed to encourage more students to become positive, effective learners and to better prepare them for postsecondary education. Following an outline of CCC's goals and a breakdown of its programs…

On account of concern about declining achievement levels of high school graduates and proposed state legislation increasing graduation requirements to address this concern, this report analyzes current and proposed high school graduation requirements in Illinois, based on data compiled from local school documents, and compares the data to…

This document describes the basic education program for the state of North Carolina, as revised by the North Carolina State Board of Education. The first section describes a fundamentally complete program of instruction that would give the student a thorough grounding in the following areas: the arts, communication skills, healthful living,…

As part of a comprehensive study of all mandates placed by the state of Illinois on elementary and secondary education, an analysis was undertaken of the school day/school year mandate in its historical perspective, inquiring into its original purpose, how well that purpose has been served, whether the mandate is still needed, and whether a…