Communism is winning out over capitalism in today’s college classrooms.
Less than 170 years after its publication, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is the third most often assigned text in college, according to MarketWatch. The business news site reported that a new online database of college syllabi showed how much colleges use Marx’s book. That made Marx “the most assigned economist” in higher education classes.
The database, known as the Open Syllabus Project, is still a work in progress, but already boasts over 930,000 texts from over 1 million syllabi.
Only Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Plato’s Republic outranked The Communist Manifesto.
MarketWatch found that the next most frequently assigned economic text is Wealth of Nations, the capitalist treatise by Adam Smith. It ranked 37 on the list, but was assigned less than half as often as Marx’s manifesto.
Marx appears again in the 44 spot, with Capital, his critique of capitalism.
