The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has just published The Ideological Capture of General Education: A Nationwide Review of University Requirements, which catalogues the General Education Requirements (GERs) at the 50 flagship state universities and at 50 leading private universities and colleges. These allow Americans to tell at a glance the nature of GERS in America’s leading universities. We assembled the information in the summer of 2025 and will update it regularly.
Our 100 different colleges and universities vary broadly in their specifics, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, epitomizing academic indecision, fails to provide category titles at all for its GERS. (We provided category titles in brackets to make up for its failure to do so.) A few private colleges and universities, such as Brown University, Amherst College, and Hamilton College, have no GERs at all. Most colleges and universities generally have a standard GER of English (Writing/Composition), Mathematics, Social Sciences, World Language, Fine Arts/Humanities, and Progressive Ideology.
Most American colleges and universities, in other words, have nothing resembling a substantive core curriculum that gives students a common grounding in the basics of Western civilization and American history and government. And most American colleges and universities, in addition to informally folding radical catechism into their courses, now explicitly require Progressive Ideology as a GER.
This last point should shock Americans.
Progressive Ideology only became a widespread formal requirement in the last generation, but it has spread extraordinarily rapidly. By our count, 36 flagship public universities and 26 leading private universities include a Progressive Ideology requirement—usually focused on identity politics and/or the radical activist pedagogy of action civics (“experiential learning,” etc.).
This list of Progressive Ideology GERs surely undercounts the imposition of progressive ideology on students. We did not, for example, include several “Non-Western Cultures” requirements, and the like, since these frequently were ambiguous cases that included classes such as Arabic I or Japanese Art. “Non-Western Cultures” requirements without complementary requirements in “Western Civilization” or “American History and Government,” of course, serve the deracinating aims of progressive advocates—but we erred on the side of caution.
Informally, much of university education is Progressive Ideology. Formally, progressive activists also achieve their goals by means such as “Learning Outcomes” (as at the University of Arkansas, whose Learning Outcomes include “Expand diversity awareness, intercultural competency, and global learning.”) or “Shared Goals” (such as at Indiana University Bloomington, whose Shared Goals include Diversity in the United States and Sustainability Literacy), which radicalize courses without technically using GERs.
Formally and straightforwardly, most leading American universities now require students to take Progressive Ideology GERs. The proportion of private colleges and universities requiring Progressive Ideology, incidentally, surely would be higher if more private colleges and universities had any GERs. The private colleges and universities that require nothing substantial also tend not to require Progressive Ideology.
Most American colleges and universities, public and private, add to progressive political indoctrination a basic framework of “distribution requirements” by broad areas such as Sciences, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts/Humanities. These distribution requirements may include courses that cover topics of fundamental importance, such as surveys of Western civilization and American history and government, but these generally are one option among many alternatives. Most colleges and universities appear more concerned to include a course from every department in their GERs—and so preserve employment for as many faculty members as possible—than to think coherently about what GERs should be, and what common education they wish their students to receive.
This catalogue of GERs at 100 leading American colleges and universities makes the case for our model General Education Act and our model Core Curriculum Act. Our General Education Act, in particular, would restore a common civic education that includes examination of fundamental moral and philosophical questions via a study of the history and the greatest books of Western civilization, and the world, by means of courses including Western History, Western Humanities, World Civilizations, United States History, United States Government, and United States Literature. Absence tells: the General Education Requirements of America’s leading universities virtually ignore these topics, much less require them.
When we introduced the General Education Act, we stated that:
In the past 60 years, American universities abandoned traditional general education requirements that gave students shared knowledge of the history, civilization, and ideals and institutions of America and the West, as well as a proper introduction to science, mathematics, and composition.
Readers may substantiate this claim by looking at our catalogue and by following the embedded hyperlinks to the colleges and universities’ own GER webpages. America’s leading colleges and universities generally provide thin, politicized distribution requirements instead of a common civic education in Western civilization and American history and government.
We now have a data-driven demonstration of our higher education institutions’ dereliction of educational duty.
David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
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