Although people go to college for a multitude of reasons, learning is supposedly paramount among them. Graduating college seniors should know a good deal more about the world than entering freshmen. The dissemination of knowledge is professed to be Job One for almost all institutions of higher education. How good of a job are American colleges doing in meeting this goal?
Surprisingly, we cannot answer that question with much precision. Colleges are in the knowledge business but spend remarkably little effort measuring the “value added to human capital” on college campuses. Indeed, arguably colleges either don’t want to know or want to prevent the public from knowing that collegiate learning on average appears to be not very great. To be sure, generalizations here are dangerous: there are thousands of higher education institutions, and they teach a lot about thousands of different topics of human interest. There are huge variations in the amount students learn. Most fundamentally, there is no universal agreement as to what college graduates should know. Colleges constantly argue over “general education” requirements –core knowledge that all college graduates should have. All that said, there is a good deal of scattered evidence that suggests that embarrassingly little learning on average goes on.