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.
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