One criticism of the book is that it doesn’t look at subject-matter learning. The dismal results presented in Academically Adrift are based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test in which students are asked to make a practical decision, such as what kind of airplane a company should buy, and explain their choice based on a set of goals and facts about different options. What do students in different programs learn, how many graduates get jobs in their field, how much do they earn? The outputs of higher education are a deeply understudied question. Not overall, and not for individual courses of study. But there is really no measurement or feedback system that tracks results, to help guide students and help institutions improve. Few of their courses required 40 pages or more of reading per week or writing as much as 20 pages over the course of a semester.īefore reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job. They reported studying only slightly more than 12 hours per week on average. Students said most of their courses required surprisingly little effort.(On more recent tests, the students didn’t show much improvement in their junior or senior years, either.) About 45 percent of the students showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or written communication during their first two years in college.Two key findings have received a lot of attention: Between 20, data was collected from 24 four-year institutions, including state universities and liberal-arts colleges. The authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, are sociologists who analyzed results from essay tests and surveys given to more than 2,000 students at the beginning of their freshman year and the end of their sophomore year. The data comes from the book Academically Adrift, which raises some fundamental and surprising questions about the quality of U.S. students who make it to college, and even succeed there, are actually learning very little. We’ve seen for some time the disturbing data that America is falling behind other countries in the number of students who attend and complete post-secondary education.
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