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Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses 1st Edition
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Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive "no."
Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, forty-five percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills - including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing - during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise - instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.
Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents - all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa's report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.
- ISBN-100226028569
- ISBN-13978-0226028569
- Edition1st
- PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
- Publication dateJanuary 15, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions0.6 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
- Print length272 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“This provocative study demands attention at all levels, including leaders of higher education, researchers, students, parents, and the general public. It confirms that students who encounter faculty with high expectations and demanding courses tend to learn more than others. Among its most troubling findings are the persistent racial gaps in learning rates during college. The implications of these and other findings should be widely discussed.” -- Adam Gamoran, University of Wisconsin–Madison
“This might be the most important book on higher education in a decade. Combined with students’ limited effort and great disparities in benefits among students, Arum and Roksa’s findings raise questions that should have been raised long ago about who profits from college and what colleges need to do if they are to benefit new groups of students. In this new era of college for all, their analysis refocuses our attention on higher education’s fundamental goals.” -- James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University
"A damning indictment of the American higher-education system." ― Chronicle of Higher Education
“It’s hard to think of a study in the last decade that has had a bigger impact on public discourse about higher education and the internal workings of colleges and universities alike than has Academically Adrift.” -- Doug Lederman ― Inside Higher Education
“The time, money, and effort that’s required to educate college students helps explain why the findings are so shocking in a new blockbuster book—Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses—that argues that many students aren't learning anything.”
― U.S. News & World Report“For a short book, it takes a major step towards evidence-based assessment of student learning. . . . All university managers might like to read 40 pages of this book a week for the next five weeks and produce a 20-page report on ‘Countering Academic Drift: Developing Critical Thinking in the University.’”
― Times Higher Education“Whatever criticism this book provokes in the higher-education establishment, its value is enormous. The disconcerting findings of Arum and Roksa should resonate well beyond the academy.”
― Wilson Quarterly“Despite the book’s moderate proposals, some critics have painted this book as misguided punditry. Readers of Teacher-Scholar, however, would be remiss not to take this book seriously. Arum and Roska’s use and analysis of CLA data, although sometimes flawed, lift this book out of punditry and into serious scholarship. They show that almost half of college students do not improve on important skills that they should gain in their first years in college, and they convincingly connect this problem to the lack of academic rigor at many universities. Likewise, although their recommendations for more accountability are vague and incomplete, they raise an important question about whether we are entering a new era where the federal government or accrediting agencies will find new ways to hold universities accountable for learning outcomes. The future regulatory environment is uncertain and faculty members and administrators should take note of the growing critique of higher learning as well as these new conversations about accountability.” -- Matthew Johnson ― Teacher Scholar
“Before reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job.” -- Bill Gates
“Seriously researched, rich in data, and sometimes adorned with dozens of tables that the uninitiated may find cryptic, works like…Academically Adrift (2011) by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa focus on particular aspects of the system. They excavate a world of ugly facts and unsatisfactory practices that has the gritty look and feel of reality—a reality that has little to do with the glossy hype of world university ratings….In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become.”—New York Review of Books -- Anthony Grafton ― The New York Review of Books Published On: 2011-11-08
“Arum and Roska offer a startling look at the current state of learning in undergraduate circles…. Their work fundamentally challenges the goals of higher education, serving as a text that will make everyone start to think.” -- Tyler Billman, Southeastern Illinois College ― Journal of College Student Retention
About the Author
Richard Arum is professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also director of the Education Research Program of the Social Science Research Council and the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools. Josipa Roksa is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Academically Adrift
Limited Learning on College CampusesBy Richard Arum Josipa RoksaThe University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02856-9
Contents
Acknowledgments.....................................................ix1 College Cultures and Student Learning.............................12 Origins and Trajectories..........................................333 Pathways through Colleges Adrift..................................594 Channeling Students' Energies toward Learning.....................915 A Mandate for Reform..............................................121Methodological Appendix.............................................145Notes...............................................................213Bibliography........................................................237Index...............................................................249Chapter One
College Cultures and Student Learning"Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should," the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, recently lamented. Many students graduate college today, according to Bok, "without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers ... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems." While concern over undergraduate learning in this country has longstanding roots, in recent years increased attention has been focused on this issue not only by former Ivy League presidents, but also by policy makers, practitioners, and the public. Stakeholders in the higher education system have increasingly come to raise questions about the state of collegiate learning for a diverse set of reasons. Legislators—and privately, middle-class parents as well—increasingly have expressed worry over the value and returns to their investments in higher education. Business leaders have begun to ask whether graduates have acquired the necessary skills to ensure economic competitiveness. And increasingly, educators within the system itself have begun to raise their voices questioning whether organizational changes to colleges and universities in recent decades have undermined the core educational functions of these institutions.
These diverse concerns about the state of undergraduate education have served to draw attention to measuring whether students are actually developing the capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning at college. In a rapidly changing economy and society, there is widespread agreement that these individual capacities are the foundation for effective democratic citizenship and economic productivity. "With all the controversy over the college curriculum," Derek Bok has commented, "it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education." Institutional mission statements also echo this widespread commitment to developing students' critical thinking. They typically include a pledge, for example, that schools will work to challenge students to "think critically and intuitively," and to ensure that graduates will become adept at "critical, analytical, and logical thinking." These mission statements align with the idea that educational institutions serve to enhance students' human capital—knowledge, skills, and capacities that will be rewarded in the labor market. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, for example, have recently argued that increased investment in U.S. higher education attainment is required for both economic growth and reduced economic inequality. Goldin and Katz's recommendations rest on the assumption that increased college graduation rates will likely have such desirable economic outcomes because the labor market values "the highly analytical individual who can think abstractly." But what if increased educational attainment is not equivalent to enhanced individual capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning?
While there has been a dearth of systematic longitudinal research on the topic, there are ample reasons to worry about the state of undergraduate learning in higher education. Policy makers and practitioners have increasingly become apprehensive about undergraduate education as there is growing evidence that individual and institutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate academic learning per se. While as social scientists we want to avoid the pitfalls of either propagating historically inaccurate sentimental accounts of a romantic collegiate past followed by a tragic "fall from grace" or, alternatively, scape-goating students, faculty, and colleges for the current state of affairs, it is imperative to provide a brief description of the historical, social, and institutional context in which the phenomenon under investigation manifests itself to illuminate its multifaceted dimensions.
Higher Education Context: Continuity and Change
Historians have noted that from the inception of U.S. colleges, many students often embraced a collegiate culture that had little to do with academic learning. While some students who used colleges to prepare for the ministry "avoided the hedonism and violence of their rowdy classmates" and focused on academic pursuits rather than extracurricular activities, the majority of students chose another path. For many students in past decades, college was a time when one "forged a peer consciousness sharply at odds with that of the faculty and of serious students." Undergraduates as a whole historically embraced a college life—complete with fraternities, clubs, and social activities—that was produced, shaped, and defined by a peer culture oriented to nonacademic endeavors.
Sociologists have long cautioned about the detrimental effects of peer cultures on an individual's commitment to academic pursuits in general and student learning in particular. Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but—more troubling still—they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment. In recent cohorts of students, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have described the prevalence of "drifting dreamers" with "high ambitions, but no clear life plans for reaching them." These students "have limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demand for these occupations." They enter college, we believe, largely academically adrift.
While prior historical scholarship reminds us that U.S. undergraduates have long been devoted to pursuing social interests at college, there is emerging empirical evidence that suggests that college students' academic effort has dramatically declined in recent decades. Labor economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, for example, have recently conducted critically important empirical work that meticulously examines data from twelve individual-level surveys of student time use from the 1920s to today. They have found that full-time college students through the early 1960s spent roughly forty hours per week on academic pursuits (i.e., combined studying and class time); at which point a steady decline ensued throughout the following decades. Today, full-time college students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activities—that is, less time than a typical high school student spends at school. Average time studying fell from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 to twenty hours per week in 1981 and thirteen hours per week in 2003. The trends are even more pronounced when Babcock and Marks identify the percentage of students who report studying more than twenty hours per week: in 1961, 67 percent of full-time college students reported this level of effort; by 1981, the percentage had dropped to 44 percent; today, only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying. Babcock and Marks carefully explored the extent to which changes in student effort simply reflect the fact that different types of individuals currently attend college and course taking patterns have changed. They found that such compositional explanations were inadequate: "Study time fell for students from all demographic subgroups, within race, gender, ability and family background, overall and within major, for students who worked in college and for those who did not, and at four-year colleges of every type, size, degree structure and level of selectivity."
Students' lack of academic focus at today's colleges, however, has had little impact on their grade point averages and often only relatively modest effects on their progress towards degree completion as they have developed and acquired "the art of college management," in which success is achieved primarily not through hard work but through "controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload." Biostatistician Valen Johnson has taken advantage of unique data from Duke University on student course evaluations, grades, and enrollment decisions to demonstrate that students "preferentially enroll in classes (and subject areas) with instructors who grade leniently." For example, an undergraduate in Mary Grigsby's recent study of collegiate culture at a Midwestern public university commented:
I hate classes with a lot of reading that is tested on. Any class where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or something like that is better. Something that I can study and just learn from in five [minutes] I'll usually do pretty good in. Whereas, if I'm expected to read, you know, a hundred-and-fifty-page book and then write a three-page essay on it, you know, on a test let's say, I'll probably do worse on that test because I probably wouldn't have read the book. Maybe ask the kids, what's in this book? And I can draw my own conclusions, but I rarely actually do reading assignments or stuff like that, which is a mistake I'm sure, but it saves me a lot of time.
Grigsby's student not only saved a great deal of time with his approach to classes—hours that could be reapportioned to leisure pursuits—but also was able to do well by conventional standards of his grade point average and progress towards degree. The student observed: "You know I can get out of here with a 3.5 but it doesn't really matter if I don't remember anything.... It's one thing to get the grade in a class and it's another to actually take something from it, you know."
Students' ability to navigate academic course requirements with such modest levels of individual investment and cognitive effort points to a second set of social actors responsible for growing concern over undergraduate learning on today's campuses: the college professoriate. If one is to cast aspersions on student cultures that exist on college campuses today, one would do well to focus equal attention on the faculty cultures and orientations that have flourished in U.S. higher education. Learning at college, after all, is an activity that ideally emerges from an interaction between faculty and students. "What students and teachers mean by 'taking' and 'teaching' courses is determined not by subject or levels alone, but also by the intentions of the participants," Arthur Powell and his colleagues observed two decades ago about U.S. high schools. In these settings, formal and informal "treaties" often emerged: where teaching was "perceived as an art of capturing audiences and entertaining them," and teachers and students "arrange deals or treaties that promote mutual goals or that keep the peace." Higher education researcher George Kuh has extended this insight to colleges and universities, arguing that a "disengagement compact" has been struck on many contemporary campuses between faculty and students. This compact is described by Kuh as
"I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades—B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning—on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.
If students are able to receive high marks and make steady progress towards their college degrees with such limited academic effort, must not faculty bare some responsibility for the low standards that exist in these settings?
When discussing the extent to which faculty are implicated in condoning and accommodating low levels of student commitment to academic coursework, it is important to acknowledge how varied faculty work lives are given the differentiated structure of U.S. higher education. In many lower-tier public colleges and universities that in recent years have faced growing resource constraints, traditional forms of faculty direct instruction have themselves been undermined by the replacement of full-time tenure track faculty with adjunct, graduate student, and other alternative forms of instruction. Recent government reports indicate that the percentage of full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions declined from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent by 2005. The changes in lower-tiered public institutions have often been even more pronounced. Full-time faculty in resource-poor institutions likely feel increasingly overwhelmed and demoralized by the growing institutional demands placed on them and their inability to identify sufficient resources to maintain traditional levels of support for undergraduate education.
In other settings where the costs of higher education have increased at roughly twice the rate of inflation for several decades and resources are therefore less constrained, faculty are nevertheless often distracted by institutional demands and individual incentives to devote increased attention to research productivity. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, for example, astutely noted four decades ago that "large numbers of Ph.D.s now regard themselves almost as independent professionals like doctors or lawyers, responsible primarily to themselves and their colleagues rather than their employers, and committed to the advancement of knowledge rather than of any particular institutions." Throughout the higher education system, faculty are increasingly expected to focus on producing scholarship rather than simply concentrating on teaching and institutional service. This faculty orientation is deep-seated, as graduate training programs that prepare the next generation of faculty are housed primarily at research universities and offer little focus or guidance on developing instructional skills. As Derek Bok observed, "in the eyes of most faculty members in research universities, teaching is an art that is either too simple to require formal preparation, too personal to be taught to others, or too innate to be conveyed to anyone lacking the necessary gift."
Ernest Boyer's work in the late 1980s highlighted the changing "priorities of the professoriate" as well as the institutional diffusion of the university research model to faculty at institutions throughout the system. Boyer noted that while 21 percent of faculty in 1969 strongly agreed with the statement that "in my department it is difficult for a person to achieve tenure if he or she does not publish," two decades later the percentage of faculty agreeing with that statement had doubled to 42 percent. By 1989, faculty at four-year colleges overwhelmingly reported that scholarship was more important than teaching for tenure decisions in their departments. For example, in terms of the significance of teaching related assessments for tenure, only 13 percent of faculty at four-year colleges reported classroom observations as very important, 5 percent reported course syllabi as very important, 5 percent reported academic advisement as very important, and 9 percent reported student recommendations as very important. Interestingly, the only form of instructional assessment that more than one in eight faculty considered as critical for tenure was student course evaluations: 25 percent of four-year college faculty reported these instruments as very important for tenure decisions. To the extent that teaching mattered in tenure decisions at all, student satisfaction with courses was the primary measure that faculty considered relevant: a measure that partially encourages individual faculty to game the system by replacing rigorous and demanding classroom instruction with entertaining classroom activities, lower academic standards, and a generous distribution of high course marks. Research on course evaluations by Valen Johnson has convincingly demonstrated that "higher grades do lead to better course evaluations" and "student course evaluations are not very good indicators of how much students have learned."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Academically Adriftby Richard Arum Josipa Roksa Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (January 15, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0226028569
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226028569
- Item Weight : 15.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 0.6 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #169,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #190 in Education Assessment (Books)
- #4,032 in Unknown
- #12,808 in Reference (Books)
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About the authors
Richard Arum is Professor of Sociology and Education, New York University; and Director of Education Research Programs at the Social Science Research Council. He is author of numerous books and peer reviewed articles in leading social science journals including American Sociological Review, Criminology, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociology of Education and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. Arum also successfully led recent efforts to organize educational stakeholders in New York City to create the Research Alliance for New York City Schools (an entity loosely modeled after the Consortium on Chicago School Research, focused on ongoing evaluation and assessment research to support public school improvement efforts). He received a B.A. from Tufts University, a M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to teaching in higher education for the past two decades, Arum previously taught for five years in the Oakland, California public schools.
Josipa Roksa is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the University of Virginia. Her research has examined a range of topics regarding inequality in higher education, including class, race, and gender inequality in access and completion. In addition, her recent work has focused on learning in higher education, examining whether and how much students develop general collegiate skills, how different college experience contribute to the development of those skills, and the consequences of general collegiate skills for life after college. She received a B.A. in Psychology from Mount Holyoke College, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University (NYU).
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Basically, the book looks at the results of the CLA (Collegiate Learning Assessment) instrument that was administered over several years to 2,000+ students at two dozen diverse American colleges/universities. The CLA instrument does not assess content; it assesses the takers' ability to understand information, sort through it and propose answers/interpretations/solutions in clear and persuasive prose. In short, it measures those skills (written communication, critical thinking, problem solving, etc.) that the educational establishment in general and individual institutions in particular claim to be enhanced, refined and expanded by the college experience.
The bottom line is that for many students these skills are not expanded in the course of their undergraduate experience. This epiphany is an epiphany only in the sense that it has been supported by elaborate testing and elaborate, skilled analysis. There are, of course, loopholes. Not all institutions and not all students were tested. How could they be? And, of course, whenever we are talking about human performance or behavior there are a multiplicity of possible reasons that can be adduced as being causal. Critics, including defenders of the current situation, have seized upon these loopholes in an attempt to reduce the force of Arum and Roksa's argument.
The main point that I would make is that that argument is made very convincingly and in great detail, with full awareness that the authors are providing reputable social science, not an apodictic proof that will absolutely compel belief and silence any possible opponents. Readers should be aware that this is a piece of thoughtful research (supported by a 60+ pp. methodological appendix), not a polemic, not a screed, not a phillipic.
The reasons for students' lack of academic progress (in this particular sense and area) has been addressed by dozens of commentators. Arum and Roksa are well aware of their work and they present it clearly and effectively. Very little of this work is counter-intuitive and very few if any of Arum and Roksa's own conclusions are counter-intuitive. The conclusions do, however, step on toes. Some of the conclusions include the following: a) more progress is made by students of the sciences, social sciences and humanities than by students in business, education and social work; b) individual study is generally more effective than group study; c) participation in the activities of sororities and fraternities does not notably enhance the learning process; d) students are not being challenged by faculty in the ways that they should be challenged; e) students are often avoiding courses that involve decent levels of writing (20 pp. per course) and reading (40 pp. per week), and so on.
For the most part, the book confirms what many have long known and believed. It does so within the context of multiple applications of an important assessment instrument, but it also adduces a great deal of other evidence that is part of the ongoing research into the experience of students in the contemporary American college or university.
The main focus of "Academically Adrift" is a standardized test known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment or CLA. This particular study was conducted among 2,300 undergraduate students from 24 different universities across the nation. The CLA is definitely not your typical multiple choice test. Rather, the CLA consists of three open-ended assessment components: a performance task and two analytical writing tasks. The purpose of this test is to try to evaluate a student's critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing skills. And what Arum and Roksa discovered is certainly cause for alarm. Essentially, the results of this study strongly suggest that after two years of college the vast majority of students show precious little improvement in their capacity for critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing. While it is extremely important for students to master the material presented in textbooks and in class shouldn't we expect more from our colleges and universities?
As part of the research project that led to "Academically Adrift" Arum and Roksa also conducted a 26 question survey of the participating students that appears in the appendix of the book. Very revealing indeed! The results of this survey underscores the importance of rigorous coursework requirements, high faculty expectations, time devoted to studying and the potentially negative impact of employment and extracurricular activities. In altogether too many cases academics takes a back seat to working, socializing with friends and participating in campus activities. Too many students seem to buy into the notion of doing the least amount of work just to get by. According to statistics cited by the authors today's students spend considerably less time studying than their peers did 25 and 50 years ago. Furthermore, the study also found that half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during the prior semester and one-third did not take a single course requiring 40 pages of reading per week. Does this sound like college-level work to you? In doing some research for this review I came across a website from Alfred University. In commenting on Arum and Roksa's study an assistant professor of media studies joked "40 pages of what? How much would be gained if I were to assign 40 pages of comic books a week?" As far as I am concerned this is precisely the kind of attitude that we need to change. Trust me, there is an awful to chew on this book and time will simply not permit me to touch on all of the important issues the authors dicuss.
Finally, reading "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses" may also cause you to rethink the whole subject of higher education in America. For example, has the time finally come to discard the "college for all" philosophy that has been in vogue in this country for the past 30 or 40 years? Clearly not everyone belongs in college and buying into this philosophy only serves to prop up an extremely bloated system. When I was in high school guidance counselors served as "gatekeepers" pointing the less academically gifted students in the direction of vocational schools and other career opportunities. Let's face it, there is an awful lot of money to be made in the trades these days. Furthermore, I believe it is time to reexamine the wisdom in taking out college loans in order to finance an education. A shocking number of students never even graduate and are left with nothing but a mountain of debt to show for it. At the same time, many students emerging from four year institutions are not only poorly educated but also find themselves tens of thousands of dollars in debt to boot. I think there is an awful lot of wisdom in going the community college route. And what kind of a market is there for those individuals who choose to major in subjects like "area, ethnic, cultural and gender studies"? If these folks can't find a job please don't blame me or society-at-large. Frankly, we don't want to hear it! Finally, if parents and students make the decision to go to college it is extremely important that the student is fully focused on what he/she really wants to accomplish in school. All too often Arum and Roksa found students who had absolutely no idea what they were doing in college and really were "academically adrift". At the end of the day Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have given us a very scholarly and well-researched book. Since I am not from academia I found myself struggling with terminology from time to time. "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses" will challenge much of what you believe about higher education in the United States. This is a thought-provoking book that is well-worth your time. Highly recommended!
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The main finding is that more than half the students do not see an improvement on there CLA scores over the first two years of university and so they are academically adrift. Now taking this as a rigorous statistical study I have some problems.
It is very post hoc - First they ideologically assume they are "academically adrift" then they find the evidence. Nowhere is the evidence presented as showing that this drift exists. Evidence is presented the conclusion is drawn but there is no relation between the results and the conclusion - there is no linking discussion as to why this evidence means that they are academically adrift other than this means CLA is not going up. So this raises the question is CLA a good measure? What is it actually measuring? Why doe some subjects do better than others (science for example compared to social care and engineering). So this suggests the test is flawed and subject dependent unless all engineering colleges are rubbish. Second thought in my mind is, this is a scientific paper so why is it not in a peer reviewed journal? Why is it in a book where it cannot be rejected as methodologically unsound? The third worrying factor is why are there two authors when each chapter says oh X helped to write this. So it doesn't have 2 authors it has five authors but three are research assistants and so they don't count in the world of academia.
Given all of these methodological and to my mind ethical problems with the way the book is written there is one further weakness. The authors seem to fit into the traditionalist school of education. School is there for discipline and to instil morals etc. The book actually has striking similarities to the "Black Books" arguments about education from the UK in the 1970s. So from a Haidt perspective this desire for authority morality and respect puts the authors on the conservative part of the spectrum. Now this might or might not be the right way to educate but there is another view, that of the progressives (I confess I am on that side). These liberals believe that personal development is more important and that students need to find their own way - so if they are adrift that is because they are exploring. Now progressives are not new (Plato was one) but education moves between the liberal and conservative approaches almost continuously. This is why the book to me feels like the authors had decided what it was going to find before they even looked at the data.