Scholars Argue for Mandatory College Civics

Higher ed reform group calls for mandatory civics class for all college students

A higher education reform group is calling for a nationwide requirement that every college student complete a semester-long course on the American story.

The goal is to offer students training not just in facts and dates, but in the civic awareness and responsibility that is essential to being human, its endorsers say.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published its report, “A Broadside for the Nation: Preparing College Students for Informed Citizenship,” which argues the requirement would help the nation’s future “schoolteachers, business leaders, professionals, and government leaders.”

“It used to be understood that this was indispensable,” Paul Carrese, director of the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, said in a telephone interview with The College Fix.

According to Carrese, ACTA’s proposal that America’s future leaders be required to study their country’s history and government for at least one semester is simply “a restoration of what used to be common in American colleges and universities—a higher civics.”