The Collegiate Learning Assessment: A Tool for Measuring the Value Added of a Liberal Arts Education

In the history of American higher education, arguably two federal acts set the nation on a course that has yet to be replicated anywhere else in the world. In 1862, in the throes of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the Morrill Act (also known as the Land Grant Colleges Act), which sought to extend higher education opportunity to all Americans and to lay to rest the notion that a college education was for the privileged few. Later, as World War II drew to a close, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. This “G.I. Bill of Rights,” as the legislation popularly came to be known, as well as subsequent legislation passed during the Korean and Vietnam War eras, opened the doors of the nation’s institutions of higher education to increased numbers of men and women. Across generations, American colleges and universities have educated the nation’s technical, managerial, and professional workforce and helped to produce its national leaders. At the same time, these institutions have established a record of basic research that has put the United States at the forefront of science and technology and scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. Access and diversity became the emblems of an American college education, and success and leadership the expected outcomes.

Today, with approximately 18 million students enrolled in American colleges and universities, most high school graduates harbor the dream of universal higher education opportunity for America’s citizens implicit in the Morrill Act and the G.I. Bill. Helping all of them achieve that dream, however, is an objective that still eludes us as a nation.

Written by: Anne Grosso de León. De León writes about education.