Abstract
When Academically Adrift was released during the winter of 2011, it seemed like I could not turn on the radio or the television or open a publication without hearing excited and alarming talk about the findings of its co-authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Time and again, commentators highlighted the authors’ main finding: the fact that a full 45 percent of college students showed no meaningful gains in critical thinking during their first two years of college. Perhaps this finding is not surprising, the authors go on to show, given that the average college student studies only about 12 hours a week, only half of the students sampled took a class that required significant writing, and only two-thirds took a class during the previous semester that required significant reading. As a college professor who is responsible for educating hundreds of students each year, I find these low levels of rigor and learning demoralizing; they are surely problematic to prospective employers, who hope to hire such students, as well as politicians and leaders who want the United States to remain competitive in the global economy.
Although the authors’ main finding is certainly sobering, the authors support this finding with a series of analyses that are not particularly surprising. Using the Determinants of College Learning data set—which includes 2,322 students attending 24 four-year institutions—the authors show that students who had higher levels of high school achievement scored higher on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), as did those who are white, come from more affluent families, and have parents who are college educated. With respect to students’ collegiate academic experiences, the authors report that students studying traditional liberal arts fields in the humanities and physical and social sciences have higher than predicted gains in critical thinking, compared with students in vocationally oriented majors, such as business, education, social work, and even engineering. In terms of students’ exposure to academic rigor, Arum and Roksa find that students who take more challenging courses—as measured by the length of reading and writing assignments—also demonstrate greater gains in learning. Although the authors’ findings are well-documented and accessibly presented—as well as cause for concern—I was frustrated by the fact that the book did not contain greater nuance or novelty.
One area in which I wanted to see greater nuance was in terms of how institution-level factors affect student learning; yet in their analysis of school climate or institutional context, the authors focused almost exclusively on the impact of a school’s level of selectivity. Not surprisingly, they found that students who attend more selective colleges and universities score greater gains in learning. What is it, though, about selectivity that produces these gains? Is selectivity a proxy for vibrant peer and faculty interactions? Are the faculty better at such schools and therefore more able to generate learning? Although I am aware that Arum and Roksa’s analyses were limited by their data source—hence, they are not ultimately to blame for this shortcoming—I was hoping to learn more about the traits of institutions that might affect student learning, such as student body size, student-faculty ratio, Carnegie classification, the structure of academic advising, and the presence of first-year programs.
Academically Adrift left me hungry for more discussion of the types of things that institutions and faculty can control, should they be spurred into action by the finding that college students are not experiencing significant gains in critical thinking. Taking the authors’ analyses seriously, readers are left with the conclusion that the best way to improve critical thinking skills is to increase the rigor of their courses—namely by increasing the number of 20-page papers they assign. About this measure of academic rigor, though, I have pedagogic questions. What is so magical, I wondered, about writing a 20-page paper? As a sociologist who is interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning, I am skeptical of the notion that longer is better. Although writing a good 20-page paper certainly requires sophisticated analytic skills, it is not a skill in and of itself for which most college graduates will need to show mastery in their adult lives. Indeed, I would argue that other kinds of assignments may be more useful in terms of cultivating critical thinking skills that have broad application in adult life. For example, a rigorous and productive curriculum would focus on tasks that ask students to demonstrate competency in the scientific method (research design and data analysis), information retrieval and evaluation, and even civic engagement—such as writing short, focused memos and policy statements as well as letters to congressional representatives or school board members. Although the authors show that experience with lengthy written assignments is correlated with performance on the CLA, I worry that focusing on the CLA as a measure of academic rigor reifies problematic—and possibly anachronistic—notions of what good teaching is and how students should be learning. I would like the authors—and educators more broadly—to reconsider the kinds of skills we want our students to have and the kinds of assignments needed to produce these skills.
The authors recommend “academically rigorous instruction” that focuses on tasks that require “critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication” (p. 129). It is my opinion, though, that their recommendations for improving curriculum and instruction seriously underestimate how difficult good teaching is—and in some ways reflect the fact that their own lives as academics are relatively shielded from this consideration. The authors acknowledge, though, that many factors mitigate effective teaching: the fact that many faculty members are burdened by service work, that many do not identify with the teaching function or enjoy it, and that most took their jobs within the professoriate without adequate preparation in teaching. The authors are sensitive, moreover, to the fact that the system provides few rewards for improving teaching and in some ways actually de-incentivizes good teaching. Despite these acknowledgements, I found the authors’ tone in the concluding chapter, “A Mandate for Reform,” to be somewhat facile and their recommendations to be rather superficial. Effective teaching is difficult and it is an art. Most of us are not learning specialists; we are content specialists. Most of us have little idea of how to implement instruction that enhances critical thinking and even if we did, doing so is really difficult. Assigning 20-page papers is easy; developing authentic assignments to help students cultivate critical thinking skills that equip them with a broad set of skills that will be of use in their personal and professional lives is a challenge that would leave many of us within the professoriate pressed for time and “professionally adrift.”
In addition to issuing a wake-up call to many in the professoriate, Academically Adrift stimulates debate on what we want our institutions of higher education to accomplish. As the authors point out, we generally ask that our institutions of higher education demonstrate high graduation rates and gains in students’ cognitive development and critical thinking; civic engagement and an understanding of, if not an appreciation for, cultural diversity are also important missions within higher education. Yet as the authors point out, these goals are sometimes in conflict. Indeed, the same variables that predict learning (as measured by the CLA) and those that predict persistence and even “cognitive development” are at odds with one another. More specifically, the authors show that involvement in extracurricular activities seems to have a positive effect on persistence and cognitive development but a negative impact on critical thinking skills. Similarly, where many studies of higher education suggest that students should study together as a means of increasing learning and social integration, this study finds that studying in groups rather than alone decreases performance on the CLA—especially among students involved in Greek life (p. 101). In my book, Inside the College Gates (Stuber 2011), I argue that having a lively social life and participating in extracurricular activities and Greek life have positive consequences in terms of students’ acquisition of social and cultural capital; the acquisition of these forms of capital, further, has profound consequences for life after college in terms of students’ abilities to navigate the labor market as well as social and marriage markets. Although deep engagement with the experiential core of college life may not translate into learning gains, it is well documented that these experiences increase persistence, college satisfaction, and, quite possibly, other postcollege outcomes that are important to students. From a policy standpoint, researchers have not yet identified which variables would enhance both integration and persistence while also boosting college learning. Arum and Roksa, however, suggest that by making student learning a priority, colleges and universities would also make gains in college completion—although the authors do not explain how they arrive at this conclusion.
While providing plenty of food for thought for faculty and administrators who are interested in student learning, Academically Adrift can also be used fruitfully in courses in sociology and programs in higher education. Within such courses, this book highlights the notion that higher education is in a state of “crisis,” and this book could be used in conjunction with Declining by Degrees, which is both a book (Hersch and Merrow 2005) and a video (Glasser and Merrow 2005). Academically Adrift can also inform conversations about the social functions of education. Although the book focuses on the human capital function of higher education, it could be used in conversations about how this relates to the socialization and credentialing functions of higher education. Although this book is suitable primarily for courses on education, its content and writing style make it suitable for use in curriculums at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Finally, although the authors are rightly concerned with the level of learning that takes place within higher education, they conclude that the system itself is not in a state of crisis. They come to this conclusion by noting that the system of higher education is not fundamentally being threatened in any way. At the end of the day, plenty of people still want to buy what higher education has to sell. From the perspective of a market and levels of demand, Princeton professor Stanley Katz is right when he says, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (p. 24). Thus, barring any major exogenous shock to the system—one that would threaten its credibility or enforce standards of accountability—this “limited learning on college campuses” imposes little pressure for the system of higher education to reform.