The faculty, administrators, and trustees who establish graduation criteria at America’s most prominent colleges and universities have made a clear set of judgments about what every educated citizen should know. Their choices suggest that familiarity with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is more essential than an understanding of economics, American history, and the Constitution.
City Journal’s College Rankings track graduation requirements across a wide range of prominent colleges and universities, including top public flagships, elite private research universities, leading liberal arts colleges, and the Ivies. While none of the 120 schools currently ranked requires an economics class to graduate, and only 15 percent stipulate a course in U.S. government or American history, 51 percent mandate coursework organized around the conceptual vocabulary of diversity, equity, and inclusion. These schools—which have long produced a disproportionate share of the nation’s lawyers, judges, editors, executives, and senior civil servants—make clear to their students that material centered on race, gender, power, and inequality is essential, while material on the U.S. Constitution, American history, and sound economics is not.