Before the federal stimulus package lavishes billions of dollars on higher education, taxpayers should demand that universities stop turning out civically illiterate graduates. Studies show that college students have alarmingly limited knowledge of America’s history, government, international relations and economic system, and universities don’t teach them.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute discovered this a few years ago, when it began testing 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors in basic civic literacy. The dismal results: seniors scored an average of 53.2 percent, just 1.5 points higher than the freshmen.

Fewer than half the seniors knew that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” can be found in the Declaration of Independence. Only 60 percent managed to place the Civil War in the right time period. Fifty-three percent didn’t understand the concept of federalism; 40 percent couldn’t define the law of supply and demand; 78 percent didn’t know what a “public good” is. Forty-seven percent couldn’t explain how wealth is generated in a free market system. When questioned about basic American history, such as when the first colony was established at Jamestown, about half the students got it wrong.