Academically Adrift
by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa · first published 2010
15mentions
0recommended by
9HN commenters
2011–2022first – last mentioned
89% neutral11% critical
A statistical analysis of survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment to determine how well students learn during their first few years of college. The analysis shows almost half the students surveyed show no significant improvement in skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. The analysis goes on to consider possible causes for this educational shortfall.
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…Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift: >> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours…
on “No one cared about my spreadsheets” ↗…rules as well. There are lots of studies showing how hard it is to teach students anything tangible, instead most will just try to memorize everything you say. See for example: https://www.amazon.com/Academically-Adrift-Limited-Learning-...
on “Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014)” ↗This is my common complaint when the issue comes up. From the article, In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.” I had semesters that were…
on “The University Has No Clothes” ↗…7.6 percent to around 4 percent. What field has taken its place? Business, which now accounts for about a quarter of all degrees awarded. Moreover, according to the research done by Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift, undergrads in the hard sciences and humanities (including English) tend to show substantial increases in their reading comprehension skills, writing skills, and math skills over their first two years…
on “How to Get a Job” ↗…the costs and loans still live on. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/02/27/college_co... Second, the very idea that college "upgrades" the asset is specious at best. http://www.amazon.com/Academically-Adrift-Limited-Learning-C... Third, people with degrees do earn more, but remember that they actually take four years or more off. That's 4 years of taxes and raises that the government doesn't get. Given wages…
on “Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal” ↗…one more prestigious (and more stressful) than the other. The egalitarians in the US would never stand for this. That said, we cannot continue to fund the system we have which according to R. Arum's Academically Adrift, leaves many students with a mountain of debt and few marketable skills. As the authors of "Paying for the Party" note, these students had a great time but learned little. Both books (and Arum's follow…
on “Student Loans May Be Driving the Tuition Explosion” ↗…https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2862754 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2016/11/01/are-we-still-goi... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_l... https://www.amazon.com/Academically-Adrift-Limited-Learning-... http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/21-myths-th... http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/05/06/federal-stud... http://longevity3.stanford.edu/blog/2014/10/15/the-consensus...…
on “De-Googleify Internet” ↗…poor performers? Those who want to do so are always free to contribute to scholarships. Now let's consider student performance at the university level. Take a look at, for example, Richard Arum's book Academically Adrift. He notes that a large fraction of students graduate with very limited critical thinking and reasoning skills. This is because very little was demanded of them. As Arum so aptly put it, instead "they…
on “UK votes to leave EU” ↗Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the “faculty-student non-aggression pact" - “Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of their professors". And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college. How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of…
on “Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities” ↗…http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/task-force-pro... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?_... But yes, the general state of things at virtually all universities (except community colleges) is that teaching is very much secondary to research, and as a result, as the book Academically Adrift summarizes, is that a big proportion of students learn very little in college: "45 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' during the first two years of college.…
on “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life” ↗…through college. I'm not judging it in itself as bad or good. It does explain why, however, colleges can get away with poor teaching and little learning on the part of students sometimes (see the book Academically Adrift), and why there is of course a huge bias toward hiring students from more prestigious (selective) colleges.
on “Why College Is a Poor Choice for a Lot of People” ↗I understand your premise and don't have any rebuttal to it that would include facts and/or figures. But one thought did pop into my mind when reading your comment. See the books Academically Adrift, Beer and Circus, The Marketplace of Ideas, and, to a lesser extent, the post I wrote above. Grade inflation is sufficiently well documented that most academics now take it for granted, especially because…
on “College has been oversold” ↗…do educational research and development, and the lack of open access to research on effective teaching and learning techniques has had far reaching and negative consequences. See for example the book Academically Adrift on how ineffective current college teaching practices are. I currently work at a predominantly engineering school, and faculty don't even have access to most educational and psychological research journals…
on “Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access” ↗Thanks for posting this! I look forward to reading Bill's full review of Academically Adrift - higher education is ripe for the disrupt.
on “Bill Gates: Books I Read this Summer” ↗…education." http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Undergraduates-Actually/125... The problem with college is that they aren't doing a good job at actually educating students (see the above article about the book Academically Adrift). Faculty at most colleges, for example, are never even trained in how to effectively teach - they lecture. Research has shown that engineering students in traditional lecture courses are twice as likely…
on “College Degree Required. But Why?” ↗