You'd hope that no American college students would select "life, respect and equal protection" as the correct answer to a question asking about the unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Yet according to a study released this week, freshman averaged only 31 correct answers - 51.7 percent - on a 60-question multiple-choice exam covering American history, government, economics and America's world role, so there's a good chance some did. And seniors, with three years of college behind them, did just 1.5 percentage points better.

The survey was commissioned by the National Civic Literacy Board, a project of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit "whose purpose is to convey to successive generations of college youth a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society," just so you know where they're coming from. ISI is often called "conservative," and I doubt they'd mind, but their purpose since 1953 has been "educating for ordered liberty," and if people want to cede that purpose to conservatives, it's fine by me.

The survey was carried out in fall 2005 by the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy. The researchers interviewed 14,000 students from a sample of 50 colleges and universities, half of them representative of the range of institutions offering bachelor's degrees and half generally considered elite (the report is available online at www.americancivicliteracy.org).

A few sample questions from the survey, The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's History and Institutions are posted with the report, and they seem like the sort of things college students ought to know. And some of the distractors - the wrong answers - are so obviously wrong that the survey is probably even easier than the questions would suggest.

In what quarter-century did American women get the right to vote? What was the main theme of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech? What alliance was formed to resist the Soviet Union? What's the best measure of the output of an economy?

Yes, I know these are mere facts, and it is currently unfashionable to expect students to know them. But it's hard to see how someone who answers "Warsaw Pact" or "Asian Tigers" to the question about the Soviet Union could reason deeply and think critically about international relations. You need facts to think with.

The institute chose to highlight the very small improvement in knowledge, on average, between freshmen and seniors, and made much of the fact that at 16 of the 50 schools, some of them among the most elite, the seniors actually did worse.

By that measure, Colorado didn't come off too badly. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, which ranked second, gained 11 percentage points, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was fifth, gained nine points. But since they both started with scores close to 40 percent, even the seniors were still below average.

Although the report focuses on higher education, it would seem that an even more serious problem is how little students know about these things when they arrive at college. Presumably on average, college students know more than their classmates who don't continue their education, let alone their former classmates who never graduated. But the future electorate will include all of them, so if widespread ignorance among college graduates constitutes a coming crisis, so does even more widespread ignorance among voters in general.

Is a voter who is unclear about the difference between "gross domestic product" and "consumer price index" really prepared to make a well-informed decision on a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation? Probably not, which is why Colorado is likely to get stuck with this economic illiteracy, to the state's predictable future regret.

No doubt many people who dislike the Colorado Student assessment Program will leap into the debate with the charge that "It's all CSAP's fault!" But there are schools all over the country with freshman scores as low as the two Colorado institutions in the sample - one hapless Florida college came in at 24 percent, which is just barely above the result of random guessing. And maybe it's true that more time spent on reading and math has squeezed some time away from history and civics, but those subjects have surely not disappeared from the curriculum entirely. In fact, Colorado law requires a course in civics.

Was the test simply too hard? No; on average the questions were easier than those on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a few of which were included for comparison. Is it hard to identify the source of the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"? But fewer than half of the seniors knew, or guessed, that it is from the Declaration of Independence.

A coming crisis? It's already here.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News. This commentary originally appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on September 29, 2006.