Students might learn how to be capable brain surgeons and rocket scientists at Johns Hopkins, but spending four years on the Homewood campus might also lead to a serious decline in their "civic literacy." A lot of them evidently no longer know whether the Revolutionary War ended at Yorktown or the Alamo.Or so says a Delaware-based nonprofit that ranked the Baltimore school last out of 50 U.S. colleges in a survey of 14,000 students measuring how much they learned -- or, in the case of Hopkins undergrads, forgot -- about American history, economics, political philosophy and U.S. foreign relations during their bright college years.
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"You come to college so that you can get a high-paying job," said Hopkins junior Tatiana Carthan, a writing seminars major, after reviewing a handful of civic literacy test questions. "These are not things you need to use in the real world."
But not all were defensive of their school's poor showing yesterday. "I don't see why we're trying to make excuses," said Marshall Honorof, 19, a classmate of Carthan and McCruden. "It's inexcusable that people don't know some of this stuff," the biology major said.
1. No Writing Sems major at Hopkins should be sticking up their noses talking about high-paying jobs.
2. It's true that Hopkins has no core curriculum and that most JHU engineers, premeds and CS majors have no idea what goes outside of their rooms and labs, but that's fairly harmless, since they don't vote anyway.
3. Many Hopkins students may not know where the Revolutionary War ended, but our alums are more likely to know it's not called "John Hopkins" than alums from nearly any other school.
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