Ashe Schow reports for the Washington Examiner about a disturbing new study questioning the value of today’s college education.

A new study released Wednesday from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni titled “What Will They Learn?” found that just 18 percent of colleges and universities require a single course in American history or government. Only 13 percent require intermediate-level foreign language courses and just 3 percent require an economics course for graduation.

“Too many college rating systems rely on largely extraneous measures like alumni giving or selectivity to determine which colleges top their list,” Anne D. Neal, ACTA president, said in a press release for the study. “‘What Will They Learn?’ looks at the most important data — the strength of a college’s education — to find out which institutions are delivering the tools students will need to succeed in career and community.”

The study, which examined every public college in America and hundreds of private institutions, graded colleges on how well they were educating their students based on seven subject areas. Just 23 universities received an “A” grade for requiring at least six of the seven subject areas ACTA deemed “essential to a liberal arts education.”

Those subject areas are American history or government, composition, economics, literature, intermediate-level foreign language, math and science.

“One wonders what tuition and tax dollars are going toward when most colleges — even public ones — don’t require basic economics, foreign language, American history or even literature,” the study’s director, Dr. Michael Poliakoff, said in the press release. “Are we really preparing our nation’s next generation of leaders when our colleges are failing to ensure the most basic skills and knowledge?”

The study also found that 40 percent of surveyed institutions didn’t require a college-level math course, 17.4 percent didn’t require a basic English composition course, and 62 percent didn’t require a literature course.

One good sign is that 87 percent of surveyed colleges required a science course.