Defining College Down
A new study featured in the forthcoming book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, is getting unfortunately scant coverage in the mainstream media.
Maybe it’s because it exposes the institutional decline of higher education in America. Maybe it’s because it upends the nostrums about every American’s need for (and right to) a college education. These scandalous findings, however, should be the basis for a wholesale revolution in how we think about higher ed. As CBS News reports:
A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.
Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
By my lights, two observations jump out in the report. The first is captured in two quick hits in the CBS report:
-Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains.
-Social engagement generally does not help student performance. Students who spent more time studying with peers showed diminishing growth and students who spent more time in the Greek system had decreased rates of learning, while activities such as working off campus, participating in campus clubs and volunteering did not impact learning.
The second, provocatively enough, doesn’t appear in the CBS report, but made its way into the Business Insider’s description of Arum and Roksa’s work:
Even though students are about 50% less likely to study today than in previous decades, the report found universities are to blame as well; largely because professors spend too much time focused on research and not enough time on the students.
If we want to right the course of the modern university, this seems like two good places to start. First, diminish the social premium of college life. If I were an administrator, I’d start by abolishing the dormitory model of student housing. Dorms have the tendency to inhibit responsible behavior instead of encouraging it and they almost always make life harder for diligent students.
Second, separate the research and teaching components of the professorial life, particularly in the humanities and social studies (I intentionally avoid the designation “social sciences”). In the hard sciences, it may make sense to have a cutting-edge researcher splitting his time between the laboratory and the classroom. But in a discipline like political science, the wonk who has just produced the magnum opus on the correlation between Honduran zinc prices and voter fraud may not have the right skill set to lead a freshman seminar. Obviously, these profs should still be attempting to deepen their knowledge of the field, but too much superfluous academic research gets subsidized by the current system at the expense of people who can actually teach. It’s a sad day when the Teaching Company has become the best value in American higher education.
- Comment (19)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (1)
Comments:
Re: Defining College Down
Oh, you beat me to it, Troy! I was just about to post the same link. And what leapt out at me was this:
A good question, no?
Jan '11
Re: Defining College Down
"students who spent more time in the Greek system had decreased rates of learning"
I'm shocked, shocked.
Jun '10
Re: Defining College Down
Margaret, there is a popular website about college admissions that has a huge number of parents defending the Greeek system with an almost pathological zeal. If you had posted there, you'd be getting hammered.
Troy, I'm interested in your idea about abolishing the dormitory model. What would the replacement be if you chould choose?
May '10
Re: Defining College Down
I agree about dorms as they are now. One of the things that impressed me studying John Henry Newman's life and his Idea of a University is that professors and administrators used to live on campus and establish the culture there by way of personal influence. Students were familiar with their professors as persons and as scholars. Now they're abandoned to the lowest common denominator of peer culture.
Of course we can't go back to Victorian England. But we can try to appropriate some of its excellences. I favor the Oxford model of colleges within a university system. A kind of academic federalism, wherein university administrators are minimally interfering, while colleges are given broad freedom to set their own terms, norms and priorities, and develop their distinctive identities. Some may choose to be more free-wheeling and social, while others choose rigor and serious scholarship...
Aug '10
Re: Defining College Down
Do we really need another book on the subject? Allan Bloom identified many of the problems a couple decades ago in 'The Closing of the American Mind'
The problem is not re-identifying problems in higher education nearly so much as it is taking any action to correct them. When do the studies stop and actual reforms begin? I get the impression that the answer to that is 'Never'.
As Bloom warned of a couple decades ago, we are now experiencing the consequences of American Universities producing legions of professional busybodies -( those who graduate with majors in Public Administration or gender studies, or some other such Great Society inspired fluff) .
Aug '10
Re: Defining College Down
and let me add 'sociologists' to that list of busybody fluff majors while I'm at it.
Sep '10
Re: Defining College Down
So far as I know - and I think Fr Ian Ker will confirm this - John Henry Newman invented the Oxford tutorial system (I don't have his biography of Newman handy). And I hope Paul Rahe will jump in as he has an Oxford degree and can likely comment on Hillsdale's commitment to the model you describe.
Sep '10
Re: Defining College Down
Claire Berlinski, Ed.: Oh, you beat me to it, Troy! I was just about to post the same link. And what leapt out at me was this:
A good question, no? · Jan 20 at 1:33am
Has no one here read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation?
May '10
Re: Defining College Down
Maybe this is good news because "critical thinking" tends to be a Trojan Horse for recruiting naive children into the liberal mindset.
--
Thinking skills as an broad content-less entity is a figment of some bored professor's imagination. Algebra is a thinking skill. Statistics is a thinking skill. Physics is a thinking skill. Astronomy is a thinking skill. History is a thinking skill.
May '10
Re: Defining College Down
I don't remember that. But, as I'm looking at two copies of Ker's book as I type, I shall scan it again and see if I can find a reference.
Jun '10
Re: Defining College Down
Yeah, I hate the term "critical thinking." I do think there is value in knowing learning types, however. Visual vs auditory, for example. So many of the problems in education stem from a weird resistence to actually amassing a wide body of knowledge. Educators are content to "teach kids how to think" with content-free curricula. It just can't be done that way.
I had a nun in 8th grade who called field trips "cognitive learning experiences." I told her that I thought all learning experiences were cognitive & she told me I must "learn to be more taciturn."
May '10
Re: Defining College Down
I haven't yet found what I'm looking for, but I did find this passage from a letter Newman wrote home when he was an undergrad at Trinity College. It illustrates the point I made above about how a college can deliberately cultivate a distinct identity with a university system.
If any one wishes to study much, I believe there can be no College that will encourage him more than Trinity. It wishes to rise in the University, and is rising fast. The scholarships were formerly open to members of the College alone; last year for the first time they were thrown open to the whole University...In discipline it has become the strictest of Colleges. There are lamentations in every corner of the increasing rigor; it is laughable, but it is delightful, to hear the groans of the oppressed.
Edited on January 20, 2011 at 2:57pmDec '10
Re: Defining College Down
I suppose the observations about involvement in the Greek system are typical, but for one particular reason: most pledges are freshmen, when they are least capable of managing distractions. I joined a house in my junior year, after I had gotten to know and respect members over time. I had a great experience with it, spent plenty of time with my "brothers", studying, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Jun '10
Re: Defining College Down
Many of us who find the Greek system repellent have objections beyond the typical ones about Animal house hi-jinks.
I would be sorely disappointed if my kids felt they needed to "buy" friends, or were so insecure that they needed some stamp of frat/sorrority approval to make their way through school. Independent, open-minded kids will thrive without attachments to a Greek system. It's limiting and snobby, and I find the hierarchy model to be straight out of another century --- (but not in a good way!)
May '10
Re: Defining College Down
Somebody over at Hot Air (can't remember if it was Cap'n Ed or Allah) had a more optimistic take. He theorized that, since the prices have gotten so wildly inflated, and the returns nonexistent, universities will be forced by basic economics to adapt. Given the current mood, they can't hope for much in the way of bailouts.
Re: Defining College Down
See my rather long post above.
Aug '10
Re: Defining College Down
Kennedy Smith
Somebody over at Hot Air (can't remember if it was Cap'n Ed or Allah) had a more optimistic take. He theorized that, since the prices have gotten so wildly inflated, and the returns nonexistent, universities will be forced by basic economics to adapt. Given the current mood, they can't hope for much in the way of bailouts. · Jan 20 at 7:00am
I tend to agree than any meaningful reform will come from external market forces and not from within the system. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has also been advancing the notion of a 'Higher Education Bubble' that is close to bursting. He's been getting traction advancing the idea that college has become a bad value and that external economics that will force change. Dennis Prager for quite some time has been making the case that many kids come out of college worse off than when they went in regardless of tuition rates - that kids are taught things that impede them for the rest of their lives.
It's disturbing that Obama Adminstration's has decided to 'go after' the for-profit educational institutions that are providing alternatives and solutions.
.
Jun '10
Re: Defining College Down
Nordman, I don't know if you have college aged kids, but Reynolds is really late to the game on this topic. The bubble has been pretty obvious for a while.
I think that many of those for-profit schools are scams, but so are many of the 3,000 or so colleges and universities in the US. Many only exist because students bring government funding to keep the schools open. Remove the easy funding and the scam outfits would close in a hurry. It's silly to distinguish between for-profit and non-profit schools anyway. Salaries of professors and presidents at elite institutions are outrageous, so I find it amusing that Obama finds fault with a program teaching valuable trade skills while turning a profit. The moral outrage is misplaced, I think.
Aug '10
Re: Defining College Down
It's not moral outrage so much as it is frustration that the country is failing and we seem to lack the will to fix anything.
There's lots of talk, but nothing comes out of the end of the pipe.
Heck a decade later, the WTC will still be a big hole in the ground.
We used to be a a nation of do-ers.
We are not any more. We have become experts in kicking cans down the road.