May '11 PR Rankings Issue - Odwyerpr.com
May '11 PR Rankings Issue - Odwyerpr.com
May '11 PR Rankings Issue - Odwyerpr.com
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BOOK REVIEW<br />
Academically Adrift:<br />
Limited Learning on<br />
College Campuses<br />
By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa<br />
University of Chicago Press, 2011<br />
If you’re the parent of a college student<br />
(or, God help you, more than one) paying<br />
upwards of $25,000 a year in<br />
tuition and fees, you might be wondering<br />
if they are learning anything. If you are<br />
like most parents, you hand over the<br />
money each year and say, “Here, give us<br />
some of the higher education, however<br />
you define that, and please don’t increase<br />
tuition next year.”<br />
Nevertheless, up it goes, much faster<br />
than the rate of inflation, and with each<br />
increase people wonder, “Is this really<br />
worth it? Are they really learning anything?”<br />
“How much are students learning in<br />
contemporary higher education? The<br />
answer for many undergraduates, we have<br />
concluded, is not much,” say Richard<br />
Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of<br />
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning<br />
on College Campuses, published by the<br />
University of Chicago Press.<br />
So I guess you can stop worrying.<br />
Higher education stopped worrying about<br />
it years ago, largely in response to students<br />
who demanded easier curricula and<br />
fewer requirements to get their tickets<br />
punched before entering the job market.<br />
They ceased caring about it long ago, so<br />
why should you?<br />
As Stanley Katz, Princeton professor<br />
and former president of the American<br />
Council of Learned Societies, put it: “The<br />
public is quite satisfied with what higher<br />
education is doing on the whole. This is a<br />
market system, and the customers are<br />
buying.”<br />
But what are they buying? Put simply, a<br />
ticket to the good life. The authors, who<br />
appear to be deeply skeptical of a “market”<br />
system, say: “There is no reason to<br />
expect that students and parents as consumers<br />
will prioritize undergraduate<br />
learning as an out<strong>com</strong>e. Rather, it is likely<br />
that other features of institutions will be<br />
focused on, including the quality of student<br />
residential and social life, as well as<br />
the ability with relatively modest investments<br />
of effort to earn a credential that<br />
can be subsequently exchanged for labor<br />
market — and potentially marriage market<br />
— success.”<br />
I should caution that this book is for the<br />
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MAY 2011 WWW.ODWYER<strong>PR</strong>.COM<br />
truly interested, written by academic sociologists<br />
for a professional audience. Their<br />
organizing principle is, “critical thinking,<br />
<strong>com</strong>plex reasoning and writing skills.”<br />
Which, they say, “faculty members across<br />
subjects overwhelmingly agree ... are key<br />
skills to be taught in higher education.”<br />
They have developed a test, dubbed the<br />
Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA,<br />
which was administered to students<br />
across a wide number of<br />
majors to assess these skills.<br />
I was interested, so I plowed<br />
through the book with a view<br />
toward giving an update on<br />
what’s going on in one of the<br />
last, great, unreformed institutions<br />
in America — higher<br />
education. Each year, unsuspecting<br />
parents and students<br />
annually hand over billions of<br />
dollars to people who couldn’t<br />
run a moderately busy convenience store<br />
but control access to one of the more valuable<br />
credentials in American society<br />
(although its value is diminishing with<br />
each passing year) — the baccalaureate<br />
degree.<br />
At the beginning of the 20th century,<br />
obtaining a college degree was not an<br />
exercise in intellectual rigor. Only a tiny<br />
fraction of the population attended college,<br />
and those who did were generally<br />
the sons of well-to-do families who<br />
enrolled to acquire social skills and develop<br />
a network of acquaintances with whom<br />
they would remain in contact for the rest<br />
of their lives after they inherited a family<br />
business or went into one of the professions.<br />
The college graduates John O’Hara<br />
(who never graduated from college himself)<br />
wrote about were clubbable men,<br />
good at a variety of sports favored by the<br />
equestrian class, not terribly keen in business,<br />
perhaps lacking fire in the belly, but<br />
endowed with a special glow acquired<br />
during their prep school and college years.<br />
Today, we are back where we started at<br />
the beginning of the twentieth century,<br />
despite the explosion in degree programs<br />
and the numbers pursuing postsecondary<br />
education. There are more than 18 million<br />
students in more than 4,300 degree-granting<br />
institutions, with 70% of recent highschool<br />
graduates enrolled in either a twoyear<br />
or a four-year institution. The<br />
authors point out that what was once a<br />
prerogative of the privileged is now an<br />
entitlement, as a “college for all” mentality<br />
prevails at most American high schools.<br />
But a large percentage of them aren’t<br />
learning much:<br />
“Growing numbers of students are sent<br />
to college at increasingly higher costs, but<br />
for a large proportion of them the gains in<br />
critical thinking, <strong>com</strong>plex reasoning and<br />
written <strong>com</strong>munication are either exceedingly<br />
small or empirically nonexistent. At<br />
least 45 percent of students in our sample<br />
did not demonstrate any statistically significant<br />
improvement in CLA performance<br />
during the first two years of college.”<br />
Well, what are they doing,<br />
then, since they always seem<br />
to be so busy and short of time<br />
for things like studying, <strong>com</strong>pleting<br />
assignments, working<br />
on collaborative projects, and<br />
the like?<br />
“The college experience is<br />
perceived by many students to<br />
be, at its core, a social experience.<br />
The collegiate culture<br />
emphasizes sociability and<br />
encourages students to have<br />
fun — to do all the things they have not<br />
had a chance to do before, or may not<br />
have a chance to do after they enter ‘the<br />
real world’ of the labor market.”<br />
The devolution of undergraduate education<br />
has been going on for at least 40<br />
years now, so why isn’t somebody doing<br />
something? The contributors to this book<br />
are quite candid and straightforward<br />
about it:<br />
“Colleges operate primarily as sorting<br />
mechanisms. The education system is<br />
viewed as a very <strong>com</strong>plicated sieve,<br />
which sifts the good from the bad future<br />
citizens, the able from the dull, those fitted<br />
for high positions from those unfitted.”<br />
That means if you get into a highly<br />
selective college and can find a way to<br />
pay for it, you are already on a higher<br />
plane of existence, regardless of what you<br />
learn between entrance and graduation.<br />
The authors note that this is a cynical<br />
view, but it seems all too real to some<br />
people in decision-making positions.<br />
Although parents and some students<br />
may be shocked to learn the state of play<br />
in higher education, the institutions themselves<br />
have little reason for concern:<br />
“Limited learning on college campuses<br />
is not a crisis [a term the authors say they<br />
consciously avoided] because the institutional<br />
actors implicated in the system are<br />
receiving the organizational out<strong>com</strong>es<br />
that they seek, and therefore neither the<br />
institutions themselves nor the system as<br />
a whole is in any way challenged or<br />
threatened.”<br />
If I read this book correctly, we can<br />
reduce the time for a degree to three<br />
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