College Students Get a Soft Landing: Few Are Required to Master Basics

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Something's missing on America's campuses.

The nation's leading institutions of higher education have abandoned the core academic requirements once considered essential to a liberal arts education and to the preservation of a democratic society, says a study being released tomorrow.

This institutional reluctance to let freshmen and sophomores know that some courses and subjects are worthier than others has its roots in the '60s, the National Association of Scholars reports after scrutinizing requirements for a bachelor's degree at 50 of the nation's most prestigious institutions of higher education.

Commitment to structured general education requirements and rigorous standards for completing them have "largely vanished" the past 30 years, and there has been a "purging . . . of many of the required basic survey courses that used to familiarize students with the historical, cultural, political and scientific foundations of their society," the report says.

"This neglect has placed …