Part 1 (1/2)
Academically Adrift.
Limited Learning on College Campuses.
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.
Acknowledgments.
The research project that led to this book was organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) as part of its collaborative partners.h.i.+p with the Pathways to College Networka”an alliance of national organizations that advances college opportunity for underserved students by raising public awareness, supporting innovative research, and promoting evidence-based policies and practices across the Ka”12 and higher-education sectors. The initial conception and organizational impetus for this endeavor grew out of efforts led by former SSRC program director Sheri Ranis. Ann Coles, former director of the Pathways to College Network, provided critical a.s.sistance in gaining external support for this project. Other members of the Pathways to College Network leaders.h.i.+p team, including Alma Peterson and Cheryl Blanco, also provided support for our efforts over the past several years. In addition, we are grateful to Mich.e.l.le Cooper, Alisa Cunningham, and Lorelle Espinosa at the Inst.i.tute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), who have supported this project through their current leaders.h.i.+p roles in the Pathways to College Network.
This research project was made possible by generous support from the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Teagle Foundation, as well as a 2007a”8 Fulbright New Century Scholar aHigher Education in the 21st Century: Access and Equitya award. The following foundation officers provided critical support and advice that has proven essential for the success of this project: Tina Gridiron Smith and Dewayne Matthews, as well as Jamie Merisotis and Susan Johnson (Lumina Foundation); Jorge Balan and Greg Andersen (Ford Foundation); Barbara Gombach (Carnegie Corporation of New York); and Donna Heiland and W. Robert Connor (Teagle Foundation). We are also profoundly grateful to Roger Benjamin, Alex Nemeth, Heather Kugelma.s.s, Marc Chun, Esther Hong, James Padilla, and Stephen Klein at the Council for Aid to Education for technical collaboration in data collection that made this research possible. Moreover, we would like to express our deep grat.i.tude to the administrators who coordinated site-based data collection and staff at the twenty-four inst.i.tutions that supported the fieldwork required for this project, as well as to the students who volunteered and consented to partic.i.p.ate in this research study.
The researchers are also appreciative of input from the projectas advisory board: Pedro Reyes, professor and a.s.sociate vice chancellor for academic planning and a.s.sessment, University of Texas; Myra Burnett, vice provost and a.s.sociate professor of psychology, Spelman College; William (Bill) Trent, professor of educational policy studies, University of Illinois; and Meredith Phillips, a.s.sociate professor of public policy and sociology, University of California at Los Angeles. The ma.n.u.script also benefited from insightful comments and suggestions received during presentations in diverse settings including the SSRCas Learning in Higher Education conference, organized with the support of the National a.s.sociation of State University and Land Grant Colleges (Chicago, November 2008); the annual meeting of the American Educational Research a.s.sociation (San Diego, April 2009); the annual meeting of the American Sociological a.s.sociation (San Francisco, August 2009); the International Sociology a.s.sociationas Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (Florence, May 2008); New York Universityas Applied Psychology Colloquium; the University of Virginia Curry School of Educationas Risk and Prevention Speaker Series; the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, University of Notre Dame; the Department of Sociology at Memorial University, Canada; and the Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment Spotlight Workshop.
Critical comments and recommendations for the project were provided by some of our close colleagues including Joan Malczewski, Mitch.e.l.l Stevens, and Jonathan Zimmerman, as well as by students in the fall 2009 New York University doctoral seminar aEducational Research in the United States: Problems and Possibilities.a We are grateful to our colleagues and students, as well as to the anonymous reviewers at the University of Chicago Press, for their constructive feedback.
The Social Science Research Council program coordinators for this project were Kim Pereira and Jeannie Kim, who provided full-time management of the Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment longitudinal project study from fall 2007 to summer 2008 and from fall 2008 to summer 2010 respectively. Without their professional competence, dedication, and commitment, this research would not have been possible. Additional a.s.sistance was provided at the SSRC by Maria Diaz, Carmin Galts, Sujung Kang, Julie Kellogg, Abby Larson, Katherine Long, Jaclyn Rosamilia, and Nicky Stephenson. Melissa Velez served as a primary research a.s.sistant for the statistical a.n.a.lysis, and is coauthor of chapters 2 and 3 as well as the methodological appendix. Velezas statistical sophistication and sociological insights have been heavily drawn upon throughout this project. Research a.s.sistance was also provided by Daniel Potter, who coauth.o.r.ed chapters 2 and 4, and Jeannie Kim, who coauth.o.r.ed chapter 3. Potter and Kim made both technical and substantive contributions to the chapters they coauth.o.r.ed.
Dedicated staff at the University of Chicago Press skillfully led this book through the final revisions and publication process. We are particularly indebted to Elizabeth Branch Dyson for her feedback and guidance; her enthusiasm and belief in the importance of this project propelled us through the final months of writing. We would also like to thank Anne Summers Goldberg for her technical a.s.sistance and Renaldo Migaldi for his meticulous editorial work.
Finally, we would like to express our deepest personal grat.i.tude to those who have lived with us and nourished us throughout this project. Shenandoah, best friend and confidant, provided much needed balance and a sense of humor along the way. Joan served as a personal and professional companion. Sydney, Eero, Luke, and Zora, through their dedication to their own schooling and their commitment to inhabit these colleges and universities in the future, served as inspirations.
While this research would not have been possible without the contributions from the individuals and inst.i.tutions identified above, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa are fully responsible for all findings presented, claims made, and opinions expressed in this book.
1.
College Cultures and Student Learning.
aColleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should,a the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, recently lamented. Many students graduate college today, according to Bok, awithout being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers a reason clearly or perform competently in a.n.a.lyzing complex, nontechnical problems.a1 While concern over undergraduate learning in this country has longstanding roots, in recent years increased attention has been focused on this issue not only by former Ivy League presidents, but also by policy makers, pract.i.tioners, and the public. Stakeholders in the higher education system have increasingly come to raise questions about the state of collegiate learning for a diverse set of reasons. Legislatorsa”and privately, middle-cla.s.s parents as wella”increasingly have expressed worry over the value and returns to their investments in higher education. Business leaders have begun to ask whether graduates have acquired the necessary skills to ensure economic compet.i.tiveness. And increasingly, educators within the system itself have begun to raise their voices questioning whether organizational changes to colleges and universities in recent decades have undermined the core educational functions of these inst.i.tutions.
These diverse concerns about the state of undergraduate education have served to draw attention to measuring whether students are actually developing the capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning at college. In a rapidly changing economy and society, there is widespread agreement that these individual capacities are the foundation for effective democratic citizens.h.i.+p and economic productivity. aWith all the controversy over the college curriculum,a Derek Bok has commented, ait is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the princ.i.p.al aim of undergraduate education.a2 Inst.i.tutional mission statements also echo this widespread commitment to developing studentsa critical thinking. They typically include a pledge, for example, that schools will work to challenge students to athink critically and intuitively,a and to ensure that graduates will become adept at acritical, a.n.a.lytical, and logical thinking.a These mission statements align with the idea that educational inst.i.tutions serve to enhance studentsa human capitala”knowledge, skills, and capacities that will be rewarded in the labor market. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, for example, have recently argued that increased investment in U.S. higher education attainment is required for both economic growth and reduced economic inequality. Goldin and Katzas recommendations rest on the a.s.sumption that increased college graduation rates will likely have such desirable economic outcomes because the labor market values athe highly a.n.a.lytical individual who can think abstractly.a3 But what if increased educational attainment is not equivalent to enhanced individual capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning?
While there has been a dearth of systematic longitudinal research on the topic, there are ample reasons to worry about the state of undergraduate learning in higher education. Policy makers and pract.i.tioners have increasingly become apprehensive about undergraduate education as there is growing evidence that individual and inst.i.tutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate academic learning per se. While as social scientists we want to avoid the pitfalls of either propagating historically inaccurate sentimental accounts of a romantic collegiate past followed by a tragic afall from gracea or, alternatively, scapegoating students, faculty, and colleges for the current state of affairs, it is imperative to provide a brief description of the historical, social, and inst.i.tutional context in which the phenomenon under investigation manifests itself to illuminate its multifaceted dimensions.
Higher Education Context: Continuity and Change Historians have noted that from the inception of U.S. colleges, many students often embraced a collegiate culture that had little to do with academic learning. While some students who used colleges to prepare for the ministry aavoided the hedonism and violence of their rowdy cla.s.smatesa and focused on academic pursuits rather than extracurricular activities, the majority of students chose another path. For many students in past decades, college was a time when one aforged a peer consciousness sharply at odds with that of the faculty and of serious students.a Undergraduates as a whole historically embraced a college lifea”complete with fraternities, clubs, and social activitiesa”that was produced, shaped, and defined by a peer culture oriented to nonacademic endeavors.4 Sociologists have long cautioned about the detrimental effects of peer cultures on an individualas commitment to academic pursuits in general and student learning in particular.5 Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, buta”more troubling stilla”they enter college with att.i.tudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment. In recent cohorts of students, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have described the prevalence of adrifting dreamersa with ahigh ambitions, but no clear life plans for reaching them.a These students ahave limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demand for these occupations.a6 They enter college, we believe, largely academically adrift.
While prior historical scholars.h.i.+p reminds us that U.S. undergraduates have long been devoted to pursuing social interests at college, there is emerging empirical evidence that suggests that college studentsa academic effort has dramatically declined in recent decades. Labor economists Philip Babc.o.c.k and Mindy Marks, for example, have recently conducted critically important empirical work that meticulously examines data from twelve individual-level surveys of student time use from the 1920s to today. They have found that full-time college students through the early 1960s spent roughly forty hours per week on academic pursuits (i.e., combined studying and cla.s.s time); at which point a steady decline ensued throughout the following decades. Today, full-time college students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activitiesa”that is, less time than a typical high school student spends at school. Average time studying fell from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 to twenty hours per week in 1981 and thirteen hours per week in 2003. The trends are even more p.r.o.nounced when Babc.o.c.k and Marks identify the percentage of students who report studying more than twenty hours per week: in 1961, 67 percent of full-time college students reported this level of effort; by 1981, the percentage had dropped to 44 percent; today, only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying. Babc.o.c.k and Marks carefully explored the extent to which changes in student effort simply reflect the fact that different types of individuals currently attend college and course taking patterns have changed. They found that such compositional explanations were inadequate: aStudy time fell for students from all demographic subgroups, within race, gender, ability and family background, overall and within major, for students who worked in college and for those who did not, and at four-year colleges of every type, size, degree structure and level of selectivity.a7 Studentsa lack of academic focus at todayas colleges, however, has had little impact on their grade point averages and often only relatively modest effects on their progress towards degree completion as they have developed and acquired athe art of college management,a in which success is achieved primarily not through hard work but through acontrolling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload.a8 Biostatistician Valen Johnson has taken advantage of unique data from Duke University on student course evaluations, grades, and enrollment decisions to demonstrate that students apreferentially enroll in cla.s.ses (and subject areas) with instructors who grade leniently.a9 For example, an undergraduate in Mary Grigsbyas recent study of collegiate culture at a Midwestern public university commented: I hate cla.s.ses with a lot of reading that is tested on. Any cla.s.s where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or something like that is better. Something that I can study and just learn from in five [minutes] Iall usually do pretty good in. Whereas, if Iam expected to read, you know, a hundred-and-fifty-page book and then write a three-page essay on it, you know, on a test letas say, Iall probably do worse on that test because I probably wouldnat have read the book. Maybe ask the kids, whatas in this book? And I can draw my own conclusions, but I rarely actually do reading a.s.signments or stuff like that, which is a mistake Iam sure, but it saves me a lot of time.
Grigsbyas student not only saved a great deal of time with his approach to cla.s.sesa”hours that could be reapportioned to leisure pursuitsa”but also was able to do well by conventional standards of his grade point average and progress towards degree. The student observed: aYou know I can get out of here with a 3.5 but it doesnat really matter if I donat remember anything a . Itas one thing to get the grade in a cla.s.s and itas another to actually take something from it, you know.a10 Studentsa ability to navigate academic course requirements with such modest levels of individual investment and cognitive effort points to a second set of social actors responsible for growing concern over undergraduate learning on todayas campuses: the college professoriate. If one is to cast aspersions on student cultures that exist on college campuses today, one would do well to focus equal attention on the faculty cultures and orientations that have flourished in U.S. higher education. Learning at college, after all, is an activity that ideally emerges from an interaction between faculty and students. aWhat students and teachers mean by atakinga and ateachinga courses is determined not by subject or levels alone, but also by the intentions of the partic.i.p.ants,a Arthur Powell and his colleagues observed two decades ago about U.S. high schools. In these settings, formal and informal atreatiesa often emerged: where teaching was aperceived as an art of capturing audiences and entertaining them,a and teachers and students aarrange deals or treaties that promote mutual goals or that keep the peace.a11 Higher education researcher George Kuh has extended this insight to colleges and universities, arguing that a adisengagement compacta has been struck on many contemporary campuses between faculty and students. This compact is described by Kuh as aIall leave you alone if you leave me alone.a That is, I wonat make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I wonat have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent gradesa”Bas and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learninga”on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources inst.i.tutions provide.12 If students are able to receive high marks and make steady progress towards their college degrees with such limited academic effort, must not faculty bare some responsibility for the low standards that exist in these settings?
When discussing the extent to which faculty are implicated in condoning and accommodating low levels of student commitment to academic coursework, it is important to acknowledge how varied faculty work lives are given the differentiated structure of U.S. higher education. In many lower-tier public colleges and universities that in recent years have faced growing resource constraints, traditional forms of faculty direct instruction have themselves been undermined by the replacement of full-time tenure track faculty with adjunct, graduate student, and other alternative forms of instruction. Recent government reports indicate that the percentage of full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting inst.i.tutions declined from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent by 2005.13 The changes in lower-tiered public inst.i.tutions have often been even more p.r.o.nounced. Full-time faculty in resource-poor inst.i.tutions likely feel increasingly overwhelmed and demoralized by the growing inst.i.tutional demands placed on them and their inability to identify sufficient resources to maintain traditional levels of support for undergraduate education.
In other settings where the costs of higher education have increased at roughly twice the rate of inflation for several decades and resources are therefore less constrained, faculty are nevertheless often distracted by inst.i.tutional demands and individual incentives to devote increased attention to research productivity. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, for example, astutely noted four decades ago that alarge numbers of Ph.D.s now regard themselves almost as independent professionals like doctors or lawyers, responsible primarily to themselves and their colleagues rather than their employers, and committed to the advancement of knowledge rather than of any particular inst.i.tutions.a14 Throughout the higher education system, faculty are increasingly expected to focus on producing scholars.h.i.+p rather than simply concentrating on teaching and inst.i.tutional service. This faculty orientation is deep-seated, as graduate training programs that prepare the next generation of faculty are housed primarily at research universities and offer little focus or guidance on developing instructional skills. As Derek Bok observed, ain the eyes of most faculty members in research universities, teaching is an art that is either too simple to require formal preparation, too personal to be taught to others, or too innate to be conveyed to anyone lacking the necessary gift.a15 Ernest Boyeras work in the late 1980s highlighted the changing apriorities of the professoriatea as well as the inst.i.tutional diffusion of the university research model to faculty at inst.i.tutions throughout the system. Boyer noted that while 21 percent of faculty in 1969 strongly agreed with the statement that ain my department it is difficult for a person to achieve tenure if he or she does not publish,a two decades later the percentage of faculty agreeing with that statement had doubled to 42 percent.16 By 1989, faculty at four-year colleges overwhelmingly reported that scholars.h.i.+p was more important than teaching for tenure decisions in their departments. For example, in terms of the significance of teaching related a.s.sessments for tenure, only 13 percent of faculty at four-year colleges reported cla.s.sroom observations as very important, 5 percent reported course syllabi as very important, 5 percent reported academic advis.e.m.e.nt as very important, and 9 percent reported student recommendations as very important. Interestingly, the only form of instructional a.s.sessment that more than one in eight faculty considered as critical for tenure was student course evaluations: 25 percent of four-year college faculty reported these instruments as very important for tenure decisions. To the extent that teaching mattered in tenure decisions at all, student satisfaction with courses was the primary measure that faculty considered relevant: a measure that partially encourages individual faculty to game the system by replacing rigorous and demanding cla.s.sroom instruction with entertaining cla.s.sroom activities, lower academic standards, and a generous distribution of high course marks. Research on course evaluations by Valen Johnson has convincingly demonstrated that ahigher grades do lead to better course evaluationsa and astudent course evaluations are not very good indicators of how much students have learned.a17 Faculty also reported in Boyeras study that inst.i.tutional service within the university community was relatively inconsequential for tenure decisions: only 11 percent of faculty at four-year colleges reported this factor as being very important. While faculty widely reported that teaching and university service were generally not very important for tenure, 41 percent reported the number of publications as very important, 28 percent reported the reputation of the presses and journals publis.h.i.+ng the books or articles as very important, 28 percent reported research grants as very important, and 29 percent reported recommendations from outside scholars (which are primarily based on evaluation of faculty membersa published research records) as very important. The significance of external recommendations can be contrasted with recommendations from other faculty within the inst.i.tution, which only 18 percent of four-year college faculty considered as very important.18 For Boyer, what was particularly troubling about these findings was the fact that this faculty orientation had spread widely beyond the research university to a much larger set of otherwise inst.i.tutionally diverse four-year colleges. Boyer worried that at many college campuses, athe focus had moved from the student to the professoriate, from general to specialized education, and from loyalty to the campus to loyalty to the profession.a19 While some have argued, and indeed it is possible, that faculty research and teaching can be complementary, the empirical evidence unfortunately suggests that this tends not to be the case on most of todayas campuses. In What Matters in College? Alexander Astin constructed two scales: one of the facultyas research orientation (defined primarily in terms of publication rate, time spent on research, and personal commitment to research and scholars.h.i.+p) and one of the facultyas student orientation (reflecting primarily the extent to which faculty believed that their colleagues were interested in and focused on student development). The two scales were strongly negatively correlated, and ironically, if not surprisingly, the facultyas student orientation was negatively related to salary compensation.20 After examining a range of student outcomes from academic to affective, Astin concluded that athere is a significant inst.i.tutional price to be paid, in terms of student development, for a very strong faculty emphasis on research.a21 By the turn of the century, however, incentives for faculty throughout the four-year college system increasingly had come to emphasize and encourage professors to focus on pursuing their own scholars.h.i.+p and professional research interests. While recent faculty time-use studies have shown only modest changes in time devoted to research, teaching, and advis.e.m.e.nt (with the former two categories showing slight increases between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, and the latter category moderately declining), the time-use data does show that four-year college professors spend only limited time on preparing instruction, teaching cla.s.ses, and advising students. On average, faculty spend approximately eleven hours per week on advis.e.m.e.nt and instructional preparation and delivery. The time-use data also indicates that faculty report directly engaging in research activities only from two hours per week in liberal arts colleges to five hours per week at research universities.22 The remainder of time during a typical academic work week is consumed with a host of other professional and quasi-administrative functions including committee meetings, e-mail correspondence, review of professional ma.n.u.scripts, and external consulting.