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Richard Arum

Josipa Roksa

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses 1st Edition

by Richard Arum (Author), Josipa Roksa (Author)

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In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor's degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they're born.

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-10

0226028569
ISBN-13

978-0226028569
Edition

1st
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

January 15, 2011
Language

English
Dimensions

6.26 x 0.66 x 8.94 inches
Print length

272 pages
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Editorial Reviews

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“A decade ago the United States led the world in the number of college graduates. Today this is no longer the case. Academically Adrift raises serious questions about the quality of the academic and social experiences of college students. Armed with extensive data and comprehensive analyses, the authors provide a series of compelling solutions for how colleges can reverse the tide and renew their emphases on learning. This first-rate book demonstrates why colleges, like K–12 institutions, now more than ever require major reforms to sustain our democratic society.” -- Barbara Schneider, Michigan State University

“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.

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 ‏ : ‎ 14.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.26 x 0.66 x 8.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #591,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,124 in Education Assessment (Books)
- #2,417 in Economics (Books)
- #2,425 in Business Education & Reference (Books)

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126 ratings

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Richard Arum
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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.
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Josipa Roksa
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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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Vagabond of Letters

Goes out of the way to avoid the obvious interpretation of the data

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2019

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4.5/10.

Very uneven chapters depending on the coauthors. Some are very insightful, but two do nothing but unbelievable rhetorical and mental contortions to try oh-so-hard to not let hereditarianism or biological group differences show in their data, which virtually scream it.

At one point the authors note that 'controlling for all environmental and academic factors, the gap [in academic outcomes as measured by the CLA administered to incoming freshmen and the same after sophomore year] was reduced by 24%', and then go on in that vein, instead of admitting how perfectly the 0.75 heritability of g explains the data.

They note that ethnic [=proxy for IQ band in overlapping bell curves], parental SES [=proxy for parental IQ], and parental educational attainment [=proxy for parental IQ, even stronger when combined with SES] inequality in students' cognitive outcomes increases in higher ed no matter how many variables are controlled, and never accept nor even approach the group-mean-difference hypothesis (which implies that those who were lagging in high school academic preparation were by and large not college material, and 'maxed out' their cognitive capacity much earlier than others who showed greater CLA improvement; e.g. the CLA shows a 1sd gap which controlling for environment closes by 0.23sd between Whites and American blacks, the exact same gap as is found on every IQ test [cf Jensen, 'Bias in Mental Testing'; Jensen, 'Educability and Group Differences']) or directly broach the heritability of IQ or its explanatory power for literally every outcome and inequality noted.

The authors conflate the SAT (an IQ test) and the ACT (a subject matter test) and then conflate both with the CLA (which sounds like an IQ test - but the authors are looking for improvements in it and find an average 0.18sd improvement in two years, so it's obviously testing for things other than the general factor of intelligence, which is static), but never - even in the methodological appendices - investigate what each test tests, how they are correlated, and how much each loads on g, except to note that high SAT (=IQ) scores predicted the majority of the 2005-2007 improvement on the CLA.

The same with parental education and SES, both ideas which are rendered inert by Herrnstein and Murray [1994], which is given one sentence and one footnote: 'We reject the unitary IQ thesis of Herrnstein and Murray's 'The Bell Curve' (which is supported additionally by the work of Jensen, Eysenck, Lynn, Rushton, Levin, Vanhanen, Nyborg, and everyone else working in the field except for the various Gould-Lewontin-X troikas*), with the attached footnote referencing the entirety of (!) the refuted, ideological collection of essays, 'Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth', which is tantamount to a scientist quoting a creationist paper to prove that man is actually different from the rest of the animals.

Still worth reading for people interested in the field of educational outcomes.

*These are the same guys who went so far as to deny evolutionary adaptationism tout court in their paper 'The Spandrels of San Marco' in an attempt to salvage their anti-hereditarian thought.

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W. Wilson

Lots of impressive, alarming numbers; questionable premise

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2019

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This book is fairly reminiscent of the infamous "A Nation at Risk," at least thematically. The language used to describe the state of higher education is clearly intended to drive readers' interpretations of their results, rather than a straightforward presentation of the data where readers are invited to draw their own conclusions (though, I suppose the title of the book gives that away ahead of time).

This might be forgivable if "Academically Adrift" pulled from a variety of sources, both in terms of types of data (including ways of assessing) and diversity of intepretations (as in: findings from sources besides social scientists), but nearly all of the book's findings relate to the Collegiate Learning Assessment (I think...it's more often referred to as the CLA). This is such an issue, in fact, that the book's central premise often feels like less of a report on higher education and more like an advertisement for this singular standardized test. Worse, the authors continuously refer to the CLA as objective. Let's get one thing clear: no standardized test is truly objective. Certainly the CLA measures what they say it does, probably quite well. The issue is that, foundationally, the CLA is a measure of the indicators that the designers of the test felt demonstrate things like literacy and, perhaps more troublingly, critical thinking.

The argument, they posit, is that everyone who is everyone agrees that the indicators measured by the CLA are important, but these indicators, particularly in the case of critical thinking, are ambiguous. Further, especially as it pertains to college, context is important. People do need to communicate clearly and think critically, but, in college and after graduating, students need these skills as they pertain to their career, not a manufactured assessment with artificial and apparently unrelatable scenarios (based on a student's major). If that's not bad enough, consider the fact that one of the indicators for communication is "entertainment value," or "how engaged the grader is." Get out of here with your propsed "objectivity." There is no world where these two things coexist.

In the end, I read the whole thing because there were instances where the data they present is worth considering, albeit NOT as it relates to the CLA. This is a book about education based on studies conducted by people not in education. I agree, colleges are not serving their students well enough, but it's more because they collectively find new ways to scam students out of more and more money (as in: colleges have become less about preparing students for their future careers and more about finding new ways to improve their bottom line). The flaw in this book is in the foundation. Learning in colleges should be diverse; yes, themes of literacy, communication, and critical thinking should be espoused across the board, but only as they apply to a student's future career (you, know, what they're PAYING to study). No "objective" test could ever capture the plethora of contexts, and none ever should. Anybody proposing a one size fits all solution ought to rethink their strategy. It is unlikely to have any lasting effect.

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PoddleMeister

sad reading...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2013

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This is an academic paper expanded into a book, which makes it a little dry at times. Much of the statistical content is presented within inelegant graphs with long litanies of statistics (30% this, but 28% that...). That aside, the findings are fascinating, particularly that many students get through their degrees without a lot of effort and don't get a lot out of it, particularly in terms of generic skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing. And to top this off, whilst your background matters, what the universities do also matters. But it is sad that a book written by academics for the academic community has to point out that learning is important and universities should try and do this well. UK institutions take note...

Andrew Dalby

Started the conversation but fatally flawed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2014

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This book has had a significant impact on thinking in Higher Education and so I wanted to read it to see what the evidence is about students being left "academically adrift" and the answer is not very much. This is an expanded scientific paper made into a book. The authors believe that student progress can be measured using an assessment of their critical thinking skills. To get a cross-institution and cross cohort study you need to develop some sort of standardised test to measure there skills and so they use the CLA to carry this out. They also compare this to other standardised tests used to assess university entry. Each chapter then documents a different aspect of the analysis taking into account social factors, educational background, race, financial background and so on. By controlling for each of the variables they try to isolate terms related to the schools (where the students are going to university) and the teaching.

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.

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