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Limited Learning on College Campuses
University Of Chicago Press
January 2011
On Sale: January 15, 2011
272 pages
ISBN: 0226028569
EAN: 9780226028569
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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, 45 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.
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