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Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

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This book couldn't be more potentially explosive if its contents were 100% highly-enriched uranium; unfortunately, the vested interests realize this and are already hard at work smothering the authors' findings. Authors Richard Arum (sociology and education professor at New York University) and Josipa Roksa (professor of sociology at the University of Virginia) studied over 2,000 undergraduates from Fall 2005 to Spring 2009 at two dozen universities (large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and institutions that historically serve blacks and Hispanics). They determined that 45% "demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college," and 36% showed no improvement over the entire four years. Including dropouts would have made the findings even worse. Further, those that did improve did so only modestly on average - eg. moving from the 50th percentile to the 68th in those four years. These findings severely undermine President Obama's proposal to boost the proportion of U.S. college graduates from 40% to 60% in ten years, parents' sacrifices to send their children to college, students incurring crushing amounts of college debt, and the rationale for average tuitions now having risen to 257% of their 1986 levels.

The author's assessment was made using the respected 'Collegiate Learning Assessment' (CLA) from the Council for Aid to Education. That group adds that "Academically Adrift" confirms their own findings, and that when combined with our 47 million high school dropouts and the fact that 40% of entering college students cannot read, write, or compute at a college-ready level makes our overall education outputs even dimmer - despite world-leading per-pupil expenditure levels.

The main culprit, per Arum and Roksa, is lack of academic rigor. The authors also found that 32% of the students they studied did not take any courses with 40 pages or more of reading/week, and 50% did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages during the semester. The authors also report that students spend an average of only 12-14 hours/week studying - 50% less than a few decades ago (per Babcock and Marks), and much of that study took place in fashionable but inefficient groups (per the data analysis). Another conclusion from the authors - instructors tend to be more focused on their own research than teaching. Despite this lack of effort, professor Arum also noes that the students studied averaged a 3.2 GPA. The 'good news' is that students reporting high expectations from faculty members did better, and 23% of the variation in CLA performance occurred across institutions.

The authors' findings are also consistent, per the New York Times (1/17/2010), with the National Survey of Student Engagement's previous review of thousands of students at almost six hundred colleges. That survey found that 12% of first-year students did essentially no quantitative reasoning activity in their coursework, and 51% of seniors had not written a paper during their final year that was at least 20 pages long - even at the top 10% of schools in the study. Similarly, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni study of more than 700 top educational institutions found that students can graduate with ever having exposure to composition, American history, or economics ("The Washington Post, 1/19/2011), while the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found the percentage of college graduates proficient in prose literacy decline from 40% to 31% in the past decade.

The authors found that students in traditional liberal-arts fields improved more on the CLA, education, business and social-work students didn't do so well. Business students not doing well is understandable, given the nonsensensical training they receive on free trade and illegal immigration, as well as logic derived from previously different levels of competition; education students receive even more fact-defying nonsense on the 'benefits' of class size reductions, extra years of teacher experience and training, and the general usefulness of certifications and added spending.

Authors Arum and Roksa recommend increased measurement of student learning, increased faculty expectations from their pupils, improved K-12 performance, and less emphasis on group study. They conclude with a question: "How much are students actually learning in higher education?" Their answer - "for many, not much." They may graduate (57%), but they're failing to develop higher-order cognitive skills - exactly the skills that educators use to excuse our dismal comparative performance on international assessments of K-12 learning.

Bottom-Line: "Academically Adrift's" findings are also consistent with studies of K-12 international achievement that found we're out-worked by our competitors. Why then do so many Asians come to American colleges: weekend observations at nearby Arizona State University indicate they're much more internally motivated, evidenced by my repeated observations that almost all the students in the library then are Asians, even though their overall enrollment is relatively small. American students must similarly become much more motivated. Meanwhile, Kevin Care, policy director of independent think tank Education Sector summarizes the situation well - colleges can no longer say "Trust Us" in response to questions about how much their students learn ("The Chronicle of Higher Education," 1/18/2011).

The authors' research and observations confirm what I see as very disturbing trends as I teach courses that involve complex, critical reasoning, and as I follow the experiences of current and recent undergraduates. Each year there has been a very noticeable decline in preparation for higher-level thinking. The students I encounter increasingly expect that they can succeed academically with shallow thinking and little effort by employing the social and strategic credential management skills that the authors describe. Those who seek a more meaningful intellectual experience feel surrounded.

The authors' observations about the importance of studious solitude and its increasing scarcity have obvious implications about the evolution of academic life. But I wonder if it is even worse than they describe. For example, the study hours they include in their data may be overly generous. Today, even those who want to learn and sit down to "study" are likely to be immersed in social media and other consumptive diversions. Students have many ways to avoid sinking into the depths of a subject or struggling with well-developed analytical writing, as the authors note. They rarely get honest and helpful criticism aimed at their individual intellectual and ethical development. I fear that the authors' important observations are only the tip of the iceberg. I hope that earnest students will read this book and set their own course.

I deeply admire and appreciate this book. I have taught at the college level for over fifteen years and this book confirms my long-held suspicion about the crisis of undergraduate education in this country (especially in the humanities). As an educator, I felt obligated to pay close attention to this book. Many people will not be happy with its findings, yet as a society we must pay attention to brutal facts: our students are failing in the areas of critical reading and thinking. Is a liberal arts education truly a social priority? My students struggle with basic composition and expressing ideas in writing. I wish these findings were in some way exaggerated or false. I've taught at over a dozen community colleges, UC campuses, and at two private universities--these findings are no surprise and do not contradict my classroom teaching experiences. In an era of education budget cuts, classroom down-sizing, and class cancellations are we really surprised by the results? Are we really surprised as higher education is becoming more 'McDonaldized' by a 'consumerism' corporate model? How about the ever-increasing trend of universities exploiting adjunct faculty and lecturers? In many English depts the part-time faculty ('freeway flyers') outnumber full-time faculty. This book is not an alarmist 'Closing of the American Mind.' However, it draws a similar conclusion: We are failing in the democratic project of an informed citizenry. But do we care? This book begs the question of our values and socio-economic priorities. Are we ruled by secular nihilism? What is the intrinsic value of a college education these days? Can we put a price on higher education? What's the value of incurring debt for a college education? Also, how is higher education really serving student interests? WHAT ABOUT ALL THE BUREACRATIC RHETORIC OF 'STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES'?? In California, community colleges were required to make curriculum changes based on revised 'critical thinking' student learning outcomes (SLO's). And the benefits?? Do such policy changes truly improve student academic performance and achievement?? Most university literature depts are increasingly under the influence of hodge podge 'cultural studies.' What if we teach canonical literature!? (And not literature for other means). Fancy that. We need to teach critical thinking in courses that focus on 'how to read' difficult books (at the proper level). We need to skip lessons on the simulacra of shopping malls or the semiotics of billboards; we need to teach individual pupils how to closely read actual books and print material. That is, we need to return to the basics--teach the next generation how to read and write! I'll recommend a few excellent books: Hubert Dreyfus's 'All Things Shining,' Anthony O'Hear's 'Great Books,' and Terry Eagleton's 'How to Read a Poem.'

This is well written and analyzed (with good use of controls, etc.), and the findings are fascinating, though, unfortunately, not really surprising. The most significant problem is their mainly unexamined use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to measure "learning." They devote just a paragraph to discussions of the problems with CLA, with no mention, for instance, of Trudy Banta's insightful criticisms. So its arguments that certain groups of students fail to make gains at the rates of other groups are interesting and even useful, but these "gains" are gains of improvement in standardized testing. That's not necessarily the same as learning generally conceived.

Also because they surveyed students at only 20 schools, they are unable to say whether certain schools do a better job than others at fostering gains. For instance, do liberal arts colleges (there are two) do better? Do some schools perform better?

And they criticize surveys like the National Survey of Student Engagement because, as they ask, can we really depend on a self-report surveys to accurately measure learning, because respondents' memories are fallible. (Of course, that's true.) But they themselves depend on self-report surveys by students to describe which student-reported activities lead to more learning.

The book is worth buying, but one has to wonder whether their methods and findings warrant an entire book. Then again, it might take the publication of a book to engender the huge media coverage the study has received. And maybe that's a good thing. Higher education needs to pay more attention to teaching and learning, and this book brings that issue to public attention.

This is a thoughtful and interesting book, but readers should be wary of the reviews, responses and attention that it has received. It was hyped mightily in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education and it has received a great deal of attention in the popular press and throughout the media. Variously characterized as somewhere between cataclysmic and apocalyptic, it has since been attacked as the (educational establishment) empire struck back.

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 book will be of interest to anyone interested in how much students learn at college.

According to the authors, each "interested" party is actually focused on something quite different: Students want an enjoyable social experience and the diploma. Parents want a safe environment for their children and a prestigious credential. Faculty members consider teaching a secondary persuit. Administrators are more keen on recruitment and retention, and the government wants scientific research. Put this together in the market model, and higher education then caters to customers. Campuses are safe, classes are fun, and nothing stands between the student and their diploma.

That is fine, but this book asks the more important question: "are students learning?" Their short answer is no (45%), not much (55%). Five percent learn much.

Consider these sobering observations: Faculty spend an average of 11 hours per week in course preparation and delivery; teaching skills are gained mainly by doing; if they require less and entertain more, they better end-term student reviews -and these may be the only assessment their teaching gets, in matters of retention, tenure, and promotion. Students spend an average of just 12 hours a week studying for a full time course load. Result: after two years of college 45% of students had not measurably improved in critital thinking, complex reasoning or writing The rest: "barely noticable." Meanwhile, new since the 1990s, "a lot of other countries ... are now educating more of their citizens to a more advanced level than we are."

The authors surveyed a couple thousand students in a couple dozen schools using a lesser known and arguably insufficient standardized test known as the College Learning Assessment test. My opinion is that it should have been written up shorter and sent to a juried journal to be vetted by peers and added to other work on this topic -- not sent to

Richard Arum is a professor at New York University, and Josipa Roksa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. They were irresponsible by overstating their findings, drawing sweeping conclusions from one nice but flawed study, and rushing to the publisher. And the University of Chicago Press was irresponsible printing it as something more weighty than it is. But they did, and did well for themselves I'd bet.

So I'll comment on the journal article it should have been. The broadest competencies on employer's wish lists and on university mission statements include critical thinking, complex/analytical reasoning, and writing. The authors claim that these are measured best, for aggregated scores, by the 90-minute Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) which uses a performance task and two analytical writing tasks. The authors used 2,322 sets of longitudinal scores (2005 and 2007) from 24 four-year institutions, and implemented a parallel survey. Then they exhaustively analyzed the results. It is likely to catch the eye of those in academic administration, but others will surely find it painfully tedious. In the back they even share the results tables, the instrument, and etc. (I suspect, to make it thicker).

You'll have to read it to appreciate the subtleties of the results, but let's say they perform multivariate regression on the dependent variable (change of CLA from 2005-07, i.e., learning) using the following independent variables, and I may have missed some:

STUDENT DATA (survey and documents)

Race/ethnicity and gender

Parent's education level

Parent's occupation

Language at home

Number of AP classes taken

GPA and SAT/ACT scores

Number of siblings

Two-parent household?

Field of study

Courses enrolled in (college transcript information)

Approachability of faculty

Faculty - student interaction outside of classroom

Faculty expectations

Expectations/standards of peers

Peer efforts toward learning

Peer helpfulness in one's own learning

Hours spent studying alone

Hours spent studying with peers

Reading requirements of courses taken

Writing requirements of courses taken

Dorm or off campus living

Hours spent with fraternities/sororities

Hours spent working on, and off campus

Loans, grants, scholarships

HIGH SCHOOL CHARACTERISTICS

Region and urbanicity

Minority dominitated (70%) high school

COLLEGE CHARACTERISTICS

Highly selective, selective, less selective (based on avg. SATs)

All these data were placed against the dependent variable: change in CLA scores between 2005 and 2007. In other words the authors asked: "what, or what in combination, explains/predicts learning?" Some factors seemed to help learning (e.g., initial academic preparation leads to faster learning, as does hours of studying alone, working on campus up to 10 hours, grants and scholarships, faculty's high expectations, and studying social science/humanities/science/math). Some things impede learning (e.g., time spent studying with peers, time spend in fraternities/sororities or working off campus, choice of business/education/social work). Some, surprisingly, don't seem to matter (faculty interaction out of class, peer expectations/effort/helpfulness). There are many observations like these. I'll mention that when they threw all the data in the model, still 58 percent of learning was not accounted for; they captured less than half the variation in learning with their large and elaborate net. This alone suggests caution when interpreting the results.

Their methods seem sound and their analyses are thorough. It's mostly well cited and includes a long appendix on method (the last chapter ends on p 144/258). This could have been published in an academic journal, and on the first read I thought its social importance and the chance of a wider readership justified sprucing it up with a nice cover and integrated literature review. After hearing some criticism from my peers, I reconsidered. It's good, but overreaching. If you're an academic administrator, please read it anyway.

Arum and Roksa mean this book as a strong indictment of the American undergraduate experience. The report received a lot of media attention when released in early 2011. Its headline findings are that undergraduates experience essentially no improvement in critical thinking in their first two years of college, and a much smaller improvement over four years than we would expect. There are two broad exceptions: elite national universities; and classes that require more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester.

It's important to recognize that Arum and Roksa stack the deck, by defining "learning" in ways that advantage students in the humanities and social sciences. Engineering schools train students in a different way of thinking rigorously and solving problems. Pre-med programs cram student brains with facts. Both evaluate their students with difficult exams leading to professional certification. It's fair to say that neither Arum nor Roksa could pass those professional exams, which demonstrates that these students have learned a lot along the way.

I'd like to see a subsequent study that gets at the problem-solving skills that we expect of engineers or medical diagnosticians, and see how well economists or English majors solve similar problems in their own area of substantive knowledge. Certainly good grad students in the various fields I know can solve problems effectively, but undergrads are a mixed bag.

Setting that aside, there is a lot of provocative material here. When we look at their preferred measure, "critical learning," students in math, science, social sciences and the humanities do make progress. Business students, or those in social work and (ahem) education - - not so much. Students who read and write learn critical thinking skills, apparently no matter what they read or write about.

Whatever one thinks of their specific findings, the book is valuable for a high-level view of the American undergraduate experience. They summarize many findings from the literature, often providing a disturbing view. Though they don't phrase it this way, I was left with the impression that too many undergraduates view college as a sabbatical between the rigors of high school and the rigors of full-time employment. During this time they socialize with friends, network, and borrow money to finance consumption (including but not limited to drinking). Academic work is a ticket to enable the sabbatical but they may not assign it any intrinsic value or view it as a necessary step toward their future.

Fortunately, Arun and Roksa's findings also show that institutions matter. Colleges and universities can provide academically-oriented environments in which students are motivated to learn, and motivate one another to learn. Some schools already do this. I hope this study sparks more to do so.

Some of the data in this book are very powerful. However, the book is written in a dense academic style reminiscent of a doctoral dissertation. Generally not something you're going to sit down and read in a few hours. Despite the prose, it's a good read with some compelling data

This book is an attempt to measure adequate yearly progress (AYP) in higher education. Stated another way, are university students getting an adequate return on the money and time invested in their education?

Adequate yearly progress was defined under the Bush administration's highly unpopular No Child Left Behind law. The idea was to use standardized tests to measure student competence at different grade levels, and see whether their classroom teachers and the schools they attended were developing their academic abilities at a suitable rate. This task has proven almost impossible in a primary/secondary school environment.

The obstacles are even greater in a university environment. Colleges and universities are not accountable to any state or federal authority. Whereas K-12 schools have a single objective, preparing children for college, each college is expected to have a unique mission statement. They are not all trying to do the same thing. And whereas you can impose a testing regime such as the National Assessment Of Educational Progress (NAEP) on K-12 institutions, at the University level you have to beg for permission.

The authors mind up getting permission from 24 colleges and universities and had participation from 2322 students. While the institutions are not identified, the authors go into some detail on the efforts they took to make sure that they were representative. Likewise, since participation on the part of the students was voluntary, there is no guarantee that they were representative. The study falls short of the gold standard of random selection of samples, but it is as good as could be done, and the authors are forthright about the limitations of the study and therefore the statistical inferences they can draw.

Their measurement instrument, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, was devised to measure a person's critical thinking ability. It presents a hypothetical situation which requires the examinee to read a number of documents, draw a conclusion, and present a written analysis. While this type of test is a better representation of real world problems than a multiple-choice test, its subjectivity makes it more difficult to grade, and leaves it open to quibbling about questions of bias, applicability, and so on. Once again, it isn't perfect but it is as good as can be done. The authors expect, and I likewise expect, other researchers to develop the CLA assessment concept further. It is something like the recent addition of essays to the college board SATs and graduate record exam (GRE).

The authors acknowledge support from a wide range of institutional players, such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford foundation, the Lumina foundation and others. This subjects them to certain protocols of political correctness. To be specific, they could not have included intelligence as one of their independent variables even if they wanted to. Secondary schools do not measure it, and nobody wants to hear about it. Intelligence is defined as ability to learn; the precise variable that they want. Instead, they had to make do with the closest available proxies, SAT test scores and grade point averages. In the end, they knowingly echo some of the errors of No Child Left Behind, asking whether or not colleges and universities are doing a good job of educating children without asking precisely the degree to which those children are able to learn. To their credit, they acknowledge this limitation.

Their conclusion is that colleges and universities generally do a poor job with the resources they are given in the way of faculty salaries and students to educate. Teaching is often a low priority for faculty, especially compared with research. Student evaluations played a large role in faculty tenure and compensation. There is an incentive not to ask the students to learn. The faculty and students make a compact: the faculty entertains the students and does not ask much of them, gives them good grades, and the students give high evaluations to the faculty.

One strong conclusion from the study is that collaborative learning is not effective. The more time the student spends studying with others, the less they actually learn. The key factors in improving critical thinking ability are the time spent studying, studying alone, the number of pages of assigned reading per week, and the number of pages of assigned writing per semester. The standards are appallingly low. Many students get through college never having been asked to read 40 pages a week in any course, or having been asked to write 20 pages over the course of a semester for any single course. Without practice in these critical skills, it is no wonder that they do not improve them.

A surprising outcome in this study is that whites and Hispanics do better than Asians. Most studies of academic performance in the United States show Asians outperforming every other group. This suggests to me that the authors are right in saying that more work needs to be done.

Lastly, it is good to see another book by Richard Arum. Judging School Discipline, which came out in 2005, was an excellent analysis of the effects of the public schools' conceding their moral authority over the past few decades. When you cannot enforce discipline, you cannot teach. Academically Adrift retains some of that flavor. When college students are treated as consumers, and the college has no moral authority to even suggest to them how to spend their time, how to study, or how to live, it is not surprising that they do not get as much out of the college experience as their parents did, and as those parents might expect.

This book is packed full of data on what is really happening with the $ spent in higher education! Not an easy read (dry, factual, academic style), but the authors have tackled the real problems facing higher education from institutions' drastically decreased emphasis on undergraduate learning to students' unwillingness to devote time or energy to learning. Their studies look across types of educational institutions and take into account the academic and socioeconomic backgrounds of students. Not a pretty picture, but good documentation of the info needed to begin any process of change.