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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years, because not much happens up there<br />
in the old noggin in the last two years of<br />
college anyway.<br />
“Students are likely to learn no more in<br />
the last two years than they did in the first<br />
two, leaving higher education just slightly<br />
more proficient in critical thinking,<br />
<strong>com</strong>plex reasoning and writing than when<br />
they entered.”<br />
Reducing the time to a degree from its<br />
present average of five years is not as farfetched<br />
as it sounds. British universities<br />
award degrees in three years, and generally<br />
turn out a quality product. Required<br />
credits could be cut to 90 instead of the<br />
present 120, ac<strong>com</strong>panied by strengthening<br />
the core curriculum and limiting the<br />
number of elective courses. Majors could<br />
be limited to 45 credits (that’s 15 courses,<br />
folks), with perhaps an extra 10 credits<br />
for certain majors requiring labs, internships,<br />
extramural teaching, and the like.<br />
That means parents could cut their<br />
tuition costs by 25%, students can graduate<br />
when they reach the age of majority/legal<br />
drinking age, and go out to work<br />
instead of hanging around partying and<br />
drinking like a fish for an extra year on<br />
their parents’ payroll. Student loan balances<br />
would shrink. It might even have<br />
the beneficial effect of forcing high<br />
schools to prepare students better for college<br />
entrance, since the authors cite evidence<br />
that “students who <strong>com</strong>e into college<br />
with higher levels of academic<br />
preparation ... are better positioned to<br />
learn more while in college.”<br />
Finally, I have distilled what I believe<br />
are some useful guidelines if you want to<br />
make sure Johnny not only can read but is<br />
also up to scratch on critical thinking,<br />
<strong>com</strong>plex reasoning, and effective writing<br />
when he leaves college.<br />
Study<br />
“Although 85% of students have<br />
achieved a B-minus grade point average<br />
or higher, and 55% have achieved a Bplus<br />
grade point average or higher, the<br />
average student studies less than two<br />
hours per day (10.5 hours a week for<br />
<strong>com</strong>munication students).<br />
Take challenging courses<br />
“Moreover, half of students have not<br />
taken a single course that required more<br />
than twenty pages of writing, and more<br />
than one-third have not taken any courses<br />
that required more than forty pages of<br />
reading per week during the prior semester.”<br />
The authors note that “The <strong>com</strong>bination<br />
of reading and writing in coursework<br />
was necessary to improve students’ performance<br />
on tasks requiring critical<br />
thinking, <strong>com</strong>plex reasoning and writing<br />
skills.” Doing one or the other was not<br />
enough.<br />
Don’t take an off-campus job<br />
“The amount of time students spend<br />
working off campus, however, has a negative<br />
relationship to learning: the more<br />
hours students spend working off campus,<br />
even at modest levels, the lower their<br />
improvement [on the CLA]” It’s okay to<br />
work on campus up to 10 hours per week,<br />
however.<br />
Don’t join a fraternity<br />
“While working off campus can take<br />
students away from their peers and thus<br />
potentially hinder social integration, an<br />
activity that brings students together has<br />
negative consequences for learning is<br />
participation in fraternities and sororities.”<br />
So does studying together.<br />
Don’t major in business<br />
Business majors consistently had the<br />
lowest cognitive performance scores of<br />
any major considered (<strong>com</strong>munications<br />
wasn’t included). They also were the<br />
least likely to report that they expect to<br />
pursue postgraduate studies, which the<br />
authors say may be a factor in their low<br />
performance scores. Social science<br />
ranked high (surprise!).<br />
According to an article last year by<br />
Richard Vedder in the New York Times<br />
Bureau of Labor statistics show that,<br />
“Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses<br />
have college degrees (over 8,000 of them<br />
have doctoral or professional degrees),<br />
along with over 80,000 bartenders, and<br />
over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All<br />
told, some 17,000,000 Americans with<br />
college degrees are doing jobs that the<br />
BLS says require less than the skill levels<br />
associated with a bachelor’s degree.”<br />
Lots of college kids are getting their<br />
tickets punched with a minimum of effort<br />
these days. But if that ticket is to hold its<br />
value, somebody has to start raising their<br />
game and getting them more focused on<br />
academic pursuits, which currently occupy<br />
only about 25% of their time. Already<br />
employers are looking to the graduate<br />
schools and foreign graduates to fill<br />
demanding technical positions, while<br />
assigning holders of American bachelor’s<br />
degrees to “routine” positions, the<br />
authors say. The corporate equivalent of<br />
parking lot attendants, in other words.<br />
Despite its somewhat inaccessible<br />
writing and subject matter, Academically<br />
Adrift is readily accessible (and reasonably<br />
priced) as an e-book on Amazon’s<br />
Kindle.<br />
Kudos to the authors and the<br />
University of Chicago Press for making<br />
it so. <br />
— Bill Huey<br />
MAY 2011 WWW.ODWYER<strong>PR</strong>.COM 55