Warning! Your browser is extremely outdated and not web standards compliant.
Your browsing experience would greatly improve by upgrading to a modern browser.

Market Demand Assessment - University of Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom

April 29, 2026
Download Full Report

Introduction

In 2025, the Iowa legislature enacted House File 437, directing the University of Iowa to establish a Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) to strengthen civic education, promote intellectual diversity, and advance the study of American history, civil government, and the ideas that sustain free societies. The legislation requires the center’s director to conduct a market assessment to determine course demand and the number of faculty needed. Pursuant to the law, interim director of the Center for Intellectual Freedom, Luciano De Castro, PhD, delegated the task of completing the demand assessment to CSI and its fellows, Quentin Chediak and Andy Nguyen. The fellows conducted the research and analysis for and drafted the section of this report entitled “University Requirements Drive Student Demand” and methodology subsection entitled “Analysis of the Effects of University Requirements on Student Demand.” The full report fulfills the requirements for the legislatively mandated demand assessment for Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom.

Key Findings

  • Student demand for CIF offerings could range from less than a dozen students to more than 1,000, depending on a broad range of factors. Depending on student enrollment and desired student-to-teacher ratios, faculty requirements could range from one to around three dozen.
  • Centers do not start with demand; they create it. If legislators, the university, and the center wish to see student demand for the center, they must create it. Their approach will ultimately determine student enrollment. They can learn from dozens of existing successful centers at prestigious universities across the nation.
  •  Interviewing directors of comparable established civics centers at public universities across the nation, CSI found broad agreement on the leading factors that drive student demand:
    • #1 Demand Factor: Center directors agreed offering courses that fulfill core curriculum requirements of the university is the number one driver of student demand for civics center courses, especially if the center offers the only course that fulfills a state civics requirement.
    • #2 Demand Factor: Every civics center CSI interviewed said students are more likely to take a center’s civics courses if they contribute to credentials like majors, minors, and certificates. They saw little enrollment in elective-only offerings.
  • In its research and first-hand accounts from directors of established civics centers across the nation, CSI found three common attributes across successful centers:
    • Support from University Leadership. Center directors stressed the importance of centers having full programming, curricular, and faculty hiring authority and a shared desire from university leadership for the center to succeed.
    • Reliable Funding. Centers with robust, recurring funding from the state or university system saw the most enrollment and growth.
    • Centers hired faculty first to develop curriculum, then offered courses and attracted students. Center directors called this concept a “chicken-or-egg” issue. Legislators and university leadership often want to see evidence of demand before committing the resources to hire faculty. However, students enroll in courses primarily because they fulfill requirements for the core curriculum, majors, minors, or certificates. Without sufficient faculty to develop courses, curricula, and programs, the center cannot generate the offerings that attract students.
  • Through statistical modeling of University of Iowa enrollment data, researchers found—
    • Requirement strictness greatly affects the strength of enrollment correlation. The number of students for whom a course fulfills a requirement (e.g., “hard count,” “medium count,” “soft count”) predicts the level of demand for a course. Courses with no requirement statistically show lower student demand. Researchers call this “requirement status.”
    • Requirement status is the dominant driver of course enrollment. Among all predictors examined—including time conflicts, past GPA, course frequency, time of day, and modality—requirement status explained the largest portion of variance in course enrollment across both aggregation methods.
    • Hard course requirements exhibit the strongest explanatory power. Pairwise correlation analysis revealed that hard requirements—those with no alternatives to fulfill the requirement—showed the highest correlation coefficient with enrollment.
    • Traditional enrollment factors show minimal impact relative to requirements. Time of day, modality, cumulative GPA, time conflicts, and course frequency all contributed less than 5% of the explanatory power for enrollment variance, demonstrating far less significance for determining student demand than course requirement variables.
  • Using three comparable established civics centers at public universities as a model—and assuming CIF replicates the characteristics and factors present with those centers and achieves proportional results—CSI projected the following possible student enrollment and faculty requirements:
    • Chase Center – The Ohio State University: Following this model, CSI estimates that after offering no courses and doing preparatory work for its first two years, CIF could enroll 82 students with 11 faculty by its third year, 2027-28. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $2.8 million in funding the first two years and $4.8 million in year three (see table 2).
    • Institute for American Civics – University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Following this model, CSI estimates that after starting with zero enrollees in its first year, CIF could enroll 91 students with one faculty member in the 2026-27 school year and build to 612 students with six faculty by its fourth year. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $3.8 million in funding in year two and $4.7 million annually thereafter (see table 3).
    • Hamilton School – University of Florida: Following this model, CSI estimates CIF could enroll 35 students in its first year (2025-26) with two faculty and could build to over 1,800 students by year four (2028-29) with 35 faculty. On a relative basis, these results would require CIF to receive $2.3 million in funding the first year and $7.6 million annually thereafter (see table 4).

Background: The Center for Intellectual Freedom

Signed into law in June 2025, Iowa House File 437 established the Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) as an independent academic unit at University of Iowa.[1] The legislation places the center directly under the authority of the Iowa Board of Regents rather than under the authority of the university president, a dean, or other university administrators.[2] With a series of “shall” and “may” statements found in section 4 of the bill, the legislation directly requires and empowers the center to operate.[3] These explicit legislative directives establish the core purposes, functions, and powers of the center, superseding other authorities including university leadership and the Board of Regents.

Listing the subject matter the center must cover, the first requirement relates to the type of education the center must provide. It says, “The center shall provide scholarship” on—

1.    The texts and major debates that form the intellectual foundation of free societies, especially that of the United States.

2.    The principles, ideals, and institutions of the American constitutional order.

3.    The foundations of responsible leadership and informed citizenship.[4]

This list mirrors the language in section 3 of the bill: “The center shall conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.”[5] The center unmistakably exists first and foremost to provide teaching, education, scholarship, and research related to American civics education. Importantly, the legislation unambiguously describes traditional civics education.[6] This detail matters for determining demand for the center’s offerings.

The next two “shall” statements found in section 4 define the manner of educating the center must employ. Subsection 2 says the center’s programming shall relate “to the values of speech and civic discourse.”[7] While the legislation does not include subsection 3 as a subject of the demand assessment, its language helps communicate the full intent of the bill’s authors. It says the center’s work must “expand intellectual diversity” and “foster civic engagement” at the university. Together, subsections 2 and 3 describe an educational approach reflective of the liberal arts tradition—or what many call a “classical liberal” education.[8] Taken as a whole, section 4 of the Center for Intellectual Freedom Act mandates the center provide a classical liberal education in American civics.[9]

To know whether students will want what the center offers, one must first define what the center offers. In describing the functions of the center, subsections 1 and 2 of section 4 mark the starting point for assessing potential demand. Section 10, which mandates the market demand assessment, refers to these sections, saying, “A market assessment shall include the subjects described in section 263C.3, subsections 1 and 2.”[10] As discussed at the start of this background, subsection 1 of section 4 describes the subject area the center must focus on. Subsection 2 empowers the center to provide subject-relevant “university-wide programming.”[11] Working from that starting point, the principal task of this study is to determine how many students at the University of Iowa might enroll in courses that provide a liberal education in American civics. Specifically, it must forecast potential demand from undergraduate students at the University of Iowa for such courses offered by the center, and it must assess the number of faculty required to meet that demand.

Researchers considered three approaches to assessing demand: surveying students, evaluating demand at existing comparable academic centers at peer universities, and analyzing enrollment in other departments at the University of Iowa. This assessment relies on the latter two approaches, ruling out the survey method for this initial study. Until the center begins to offer courses, majors, minors, certificates, scholarships, degrees, etc., it would be difficult to avoid measurement errors in a survey. The following section of this report provides the findings from conversations with directors of peer centers across the country.

Lessons from Civics Centers across the Nation

In launching a civics center styled in the traditions of western liberal education, the Iowa legislature and the University of Iowa follow in the footsteps of prestigious universities across the United States. Over the last decade, at least a dozen public and private universities have opened civics centers with similar missions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.[12] These institutions and others join the national civics education movement as the latest in the ranks of dozens of similar civics centers, initiatives, schools, and programs across the country.[a] Longer-standing examples exist at the University of Virginia, University of Colorado Boulder, Boston College, and Princeton University, among others.[13] The Jack Miller Center, one of the nation’s leading organizations for promoting American civics education, has called it “the renaissance of civics education.”[14]

Table 1. Comparison of Key Attributes, Civics Centers Consulted for CIF Demand Assessment