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The overall quality of education almost inevitably sank. "Every generation since Roman days has decried the weakening of educational standards," sighs one Midwestern university dean, but the statistics provide sad evidence that there has been a genuine decline. Average scores in reading on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATS) have dropped from 466 out of a possible 800 in 1968 to 424 in 1981, when the decline leveled out; mathematics scores over the same period sank from 492 to 466. A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin reported that at least 20% of last year's entering freshmen "lack the skill to write [acceptably] and 50% are not ready to succeed in college algebra."
"They don't know how to write, they don't read, they have little contact with culture," says Professor Norman Land, who teaches art history at the University of Missouri, in a typical complaint. "Every so often I give them a list of names, and they can identify Timothy Leary or the Who but not Dante or Vivaldi. They haven't received an education; they've just had baby sitting." Nor are the criticisms entirely about intellectual shortcomings. "I think students are becoming less reflective, less concerned about fellow human beings, more greedy, more materialistic," says Alexander Astin, professor of higher education at U.C.L.A. "They're interested in making money and in finding a job that gives them a lot of power and a lot of status."
College officials tend to blame student shortcomings on the high schools, which undeniably need reform and renewal, but the high schools can blame the elementary schools, the elementary schools the family at home, and everybody blames TV. Wisconsin's President Robert O'Neil, however, argues that the colleges are "in part to blame." Says he: "Having diluted the requirements and expectations, they indicated that students could succeed in college with less rigorous preparation." Mark H. Curtis, president of the Association of American Colleges, is more caustic: "We might begin to define the educated person as one who can overcome the deficiencies in our educational system."
The traditional curriculum, such as it was, virtually disintegrated during the campus upheavals of the 1960s, when millions of students demanded and won the right to get academic credit for studying whatever they pleased. There were courses in soap opera and witchcraft. Even more fundamental, and even more damaging, was the spread of the "egalitarian" notion that everybody was entitled to a college degree, and that it was undemocratic to base that degree on any differentiations of intellect or learning. "The idea that cosmetology is just as important as physics is still with us but is being challenged," says Curtis.
"Quality," argues Chester E. Finn Jr., professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt, "is almost certainly going to turn out to be the