Are Undergrads Learning Much in College?
January 25, 2011 10:00 AM ET | Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Are students learning anything in college?
I admit that this sounds like a strange question. Billions of dollars are poured into educating undergraduates every year, while the stress and anxiety that teenagers experience as they prepare for college is immeasurable.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. When it was released last week, it became an Amazon.com bestseller almost instantly as the higher-ed world clucked about its grim findings.
—that argues that many students aren't learning anything. When it was released last week, it became an Amazon.com bestseller almost instantly as the higher-ed world clucked about its grim findings.The book's authors, Richard Arum, a sociology professor at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Virginia, examined the academic progress—or, more often, lack of progress—that 2,300 students experienced during their college years. The researchers followed students at 24 unnamed schools that included research universities and liberal arts colleges, as well as historically black colleges and those that attract a large number of Hispanics. Here are some of the researchers' disturbing conclusions:
1. By the completion of their sophomore year, 45 percent of college students had learned little. Specifically, after four semesters these students showed no significant improvement in writing, critical thinking, and complex reasoning.
2. More than one out of three college seniors were no better at writing and reasoning than when they showed up as freshmen.
Wait, they want us to teach critical thinking and complex reasoning? When did that start? /sarcasm
ReplyDeleteI love the bit about students learning more if they write 20 pages or more a semester. Try that with English classes of a hundred students, 1 TA, and a 10-week quarter. And lucky us, we're going up to 300 per class and 4-5 TAs. So it's possible I will never ever see the writing of most of my students, and it simply isn't possible to grade 5000 pages in 10 weeks and still prepare for class, let alone do the required research and service. Scantrons, here I come. No wonder they stay dumb.
ReplyDeleteOops, should be 6000 pages. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteMore than one out of three college seniors were no better at writing and reasoning than when they showed up as freshmen.
ReplyDeleteSo almost two thirds, or at least half, of college students are better writers and reasoners by the time they finish college. Sounds pretty good, actually. I suppose one could ask if we are being efficient. Do people in the same age group who go into the workforce improve similarly?
Oh, and did y'all see the part about how liberal arts people improved the most? I bet part of that effect is that natural science majors start out with more of those skills. But I still like seeing confirmed what I expected: That we beat the education and business people.
The problem resembles the corrections system's in that solutions are evident, but not politically viable. Or: perhaps the nation's brightest are now training to be electricians, plumbers, and mechanics? Given such trades' utility and stability, they provide an intelligent and dignified choice. Incidentally, my plumber reads Descartes and Aristotle.
ReplyDeleteTo be sure, I did not choose to be a plumber. At least I teach a liberal art and allegedly promote critical thinking! Anyway, someone's career choice is really neither here nor there so long as it's perspicaciously chosen (maybe requiring college, maybe not), legal, and lets the person feel useful and productive.
College seems to be going the same way it has gone in Japan, where a significant number of students -- having almost killed themselves getting in -- drink beer for four years.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure our American kids 'kill themselves' to get in. They are simply getting in to many colleges that are desperate for funds. My esteemed institution has kids who can't even write sentences, yet bring in much-needed funding. I see a lack of initial ability as the major problem. If they aren't reading in high school, yet managed to pass and get accepted to an institute of "hire" learning, what says they're going to bother in college?
ReplyDeleteRequiring students to participate during the summer prior to college in a 2-3 month retreat at a venue with no no computers, cell phones, or other tech gadgets allowed, lots of books and low-tech writing materials available, and a schedule that punctuates significant periods of solitude with regular, shorter periods of interaction (structured or not), with plenty of good food and opportunities for physical activity available, would probably result in a significant improvement. Of course, this is a lot like what the college experience used to be, at least for the privileged. And the lack of contact would probably drive the kids' parents, if not the kids themselves, crazy.
ReplyDeleteThat fantasy aside, both class size and the professor's course load really matter. As I've said before here, when I taught Freshman Composition as a graduate TA and ABD adjunct at an Ivy League institution, I had 12-15 students per section, and 2 sections made up a full load. I got new or revised work from them every week, and easily turned it around within a week at most, often delivering my comments during the half-hour conferences I was required to schedule with each student every other week. In retrospect, this was an easy to reasonable course load (it felt pretty difficult at the time, but, since we didn't get much pedagogical instruction, I was also teaching myself to teach).
At my present institution, a section of freshman composition has 20 students, and the full-time non-TT faculty who teach most of the sections have 4 sections each. We do our best -- and often exhaust ourselves doing so -- but the number of papers assigned and the amount of individual interaction just aren't the same. Also, while our students are quite able, they're not quite Ivy League caliber, perhaps in ability, and certainly in preparation. And, perhaps most important, they don't have hours and hours to spend outside of class writing and revising (and reading), because they're too busy working to earn their tuition (and, yes, drinking and having sex and all that stuff -- but the Ivy Leaguers had time to do that and read/write/study, and passionately devote themselves to an extracurricular or two, because they were better-funded).
In short, the solutions are pretty obvious, but expensive: professors need course loads and class sizes that allow them to spend more time with each student and his/her work, and students need more time to spend, especially outside of class, in reading, writing, and other high-level forms of grappling with the material they're studying.
I do not "cluck".
ReplyDelete