May '11 PR Rankings Issue - Odwyerpr.com

BOOK REVIEW
Academically Adrift:
Limited Learning on
College Campuses
By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 2011
If you’re the parent of a college student
(or, God help you, more than one) paying
upwards of $25,000 a year in
tuition and fees, you might be wondering
if they are learning anything. If you are
like most parents, you hand over the
money each year and say, “Here, give us
some of the higher education, however
you define that, and please don’t increase
tuition next year.”
Nevertheless, up it goes, much faster
than the rate of inflation, and with each
increase people wonder, “Is this really
worth it? Are they really learning anything?”
“How much are students learning in
contemporary higher education? The
answer for many undergraduates, we have
concluded, is not much,” say Richard
Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning
on College Campuses, published by the
University of Chicago Press.
So I guess you can stop worrying.
Higher education stopped worrying about
it years ago, largely in response to students
who demanded easier curricula and
fewer requirements to get their tickets
punched before entering the job market.
They ceased caring about it long ago, so
why should you?
As Stanley Katz, Princeton professor
and former president of the American
Council of Learned Societies, put it: “The
public is quite satisfied with what higher
education is doing on the whole. This is a
market system, and the customers are
buying.”
But what are they buying? Put simply, a
ticket to the good life. The authors, who
appear to be deeply skeptical of a “market”
system, say: “There is no reason to
expect that students and parents as consumers
will prioritize undergraduate
learning as an outcome. Rather, it is likely
that other features of institutions will be
focused on, including the quality of student
residential and social life, as well as
the ability with relatively modest investments
of effort to earn a credential that
can be subsequently exchanged for labor
market — and potentially marriage market
— success.”
I should caution that this book is for the
54
MAY 2011 WWW.ODWYERPR.COM
truly interested, written by academic sociologists
for a professional audience. Their
organizing principle is, “critical thinking,
complex reasoning and writing skills.”
Which, they say, “faculty members across
subjects overwhelmingly agree ... are key
skills to be taught in higher education.”
They have developed a test, dubbed the
Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA,
which was administered to students
across a wide number of
majors to assess these skills.
I was interested, so I plowed
through the book with a view
toward giving an update on
what’s going on in one of the
last, great, unreformed institutions
in America — higher
education. Each year, unsuspecting
parents and students
annually hand over billions of
dollars to people who couldn’t
run a moderately busy convenience store
but control access to one of the more valuable
credentials in American society
(although its value is diminishing with
each passing year) — the baccalaureate
degree.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
obtaining a college degree was not an
exercise in intellectual rigor. Only a tiny
fraction of the population attended college,
and those who did were generally
the sons of well-to-do families who
enrolled to acquire social skills and develop
a network of acquaintances with whom
they would remain in contact for the rest
of their lives after they inherited a family
business or went into one of the professions.
The college graduates John O’Hara
(who never graduated from college himself)
wrote about were clubbable men,
good at a variety of sports favored by the
equestrian class, not terribly keen in business,
perhaps lacking fire in the belly, but
endowed with a special glow acquired
during their prep school and college years.
Today, we are back where we started at
the beginning of the twentieth century,
despite the explosion in degree programs
and the numbers pursuing postsecondary
education. There are more than 18 million
students in more than 4,300 degree-granting
institutions, with 70% of recent highschool
graduates enrolled in either a twoyear
or a four-year institution. The
authors point out that what was once a
prerogative of the privileged is now an
entitlement, as a “college for all” mentality
prevails at most American high schools.
But a large percentage of them aren’t
learning much:
“Growing numbers of students are sent
to college at increasingly higher costs, but
for a large proportion of them the gains in
critical thinking, complex reasoning and
written communication are either exceedingly
small or empirically nonexistent. At
least 45 percent of students in our sample
did not demonstrate any statistically significant
improvement in CLA performance
during the first two years of college.”
Well, what are they doing,
then, since they always seem
to be so busy and short of time
for things like studying, completing
assignments, working
on collaborative projects, and
the like?
“The college experience is
perceived by many students to
be, at its core, a social experience.
The collegiate culture
emphasizes sociability and
encourages students to have
fun — to do all the things they have not
had a chance to do before, or may not
have a chance to do after they enter ‘the
real world’ of the labor market.”
The devolution of undergraduate education
has been going on for at least 40
years now, so why isn’t somebody doing
something? The contributors to this book
are quite candid and straightforward
about it:
“Colleges operate primarily as sorting
mechanisms. The education system is
viewed as a very complicated sieve,
which sifts the good from the bad future
citizens, the able from the dull, those fitted
for high positions from those unfitted.”
That means if you get into a highly
selective college and can find a way to
pay for it, you are already on a higher
plane of existence, regardless of what you
learn between entrance and graduation.
The authors note that this is a cynical
view, but it seems all too real to some
people in decision-making positions.
Although parents and some students
may be shocked to learn the state of play
in higher education, the institutions themselves
have little reason for concern:
“Limited learning on college campuses
is not a crisis [a term the authors say they
consciously avoided] because the institutional
actors implicated in the system are
receiving the organizational outcomes
that they seek, and therefore neither the
institutions themselves nor the system as
a whole is in any way challenged or
threatened.”
If I read this book correctly, we can
reduce the time for a degree to three
Continued on next page