Just how bad is American higher education today? Consider this observation on today’s college students from Jessica Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine: “It’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”
She is not alone. Professors at elite colleges report that many incoming students arrive unable to finish assigned books—or, in some cases, to process basic prose.
Keen to this crisis, Texas Senate Bill 37, which passed in 2025, rightly requires that courses in the public university core curriculum be “foundational and fundamental to a sound postsecondary education,” necessary to prepare students for civic and professional life, and oriented toward the betterment of society.
Measured against SB 37’s standard, a 42-hour core is not excessive. It is the minimum needed to provide the intellectual foundation a university education is supposed to offer. What is excessive—and what must be excised—are the nakedly ideological courses that have colonized too many cores. Those offerings are neither foundational nor fundamental.
A genuine core is not a cafeteria of disconnected distribution requirements. It is a coherent course of study organized around the central questions of human existence and self-government. The current statewide core of 42 hours in Texas is among the more substantial in the nation.
Some now urge shrinking it in the name of efficiency or workforce alignment. That impulse, though understandable, is mistaken.
Why? Students increasingly arrive on campus unable to read sustained texts with comprehension. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that more than 30 percent of 12th-graders lack basic reading skills—the lowest performance in over three decades. One recent report found 32 percent of 12th-graders scoring below basic reading levels, up from 24 percent in 2002.
And among young adults ages 16 to 24, functional illiteracy has risen sharply: the share reading at the lowest literacy levels climbed from 16 percent in 2017 to 25 percent in 2023. Nearly half of all Americans reported reading no books at all in 2025!
This creeping illiteracy plagues even English and English-education majors. A survey finds that 58 percent could not get through the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House” without becoming lost.
When high school graduates reach college without the habits of careful reading—as detailed in reporting on elite college students—the solution is not to dilute the collegiate core further. It is to restore a rigorous, coherent program of study that forces students to confront difficult texts slowly, carefully, and repeatedly.
A genuine core does exactly that. It is a sustained engagement with the permanent questions of human existence: What is justice? What is virtue? What is the best political order? What is the relationship between reason and faith? Students should read Plato’s “Republic” on justice, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” on virtue as a mean, the Bible on human dignity, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on natural right, the Federalist Papers, and Lincoln’s speeches on the recovery of first principles and the limits of majority rule.
Students should encounter the reconciliation of faith and freedom that lies at the heart of the American founding—the Declaration’s grounding of equality in the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” alongside the Constitution’s protection of religious liberty.
Such a curriculum restores shared premises. Without common intellectual ground, disagreement collapses into the very power struggles we see fraying our nation’s fibers. But when students share the same moral and intellectual patrimony, they can argue about applications and priorities while remaining within the same moral universe. A genuine core curriculum was always intended to cultivate the intellectual virtues—patience, precision, charity toward opposing views, the ability to distinguish strong arguments from weak ones—that counteract the sloganizing and bad-faith interpretations that, sad to say, dominate so much of public life today.
What’s more, it habituates students to moral reasoning rather than moral posturing, teaching them to ask, “Is this just?” rather than “Does this offend me?” or “Does this empower my group?” And by examining the relation between faith and freedom, it supplies a moral horizon that prevents discourse from collapsing into either nihilism or fanaticism.
When we understand the true purpose of a core curriculum, courses steeped in identity politics, grievance studies, or the premise that all values are relative fail this test. They treat truth as subjective preference or group assertion. They dissolve the foundation that makes rational conversation possible.
They are not foundational; they are ideological. And SB 37’s criteria properly exclude them.
Our country’s founders understood that a free people cannot remain free unless educated in the moral and intellectual foundations of freedom. Thomas Jefferson’s warning still holds: Any nation that expects to be both “ignorant and free” expects what “never was and never will be.” Reducing the core below 42 hours would only deepen the civic and literacy deficits already visible in the data.
The answer to a weak college core curriculum is not a smaller core. It is a better one. Texas should keep all 42 hours—and make every one of them count.