Study Shows Many College Students Don’t Learn Anything

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Wow this was quite a controversial study.  It seems that while we spend vast sums of money sending kids to college, there has been very little research on how much they are learning.

A study just released in a book called Academically Adrift talks about how many students don’t learn anything in colleges. Is it true?  Well, there are other things you learn in college that can’t be measured directly.  I don’t for a second say that the price of college is worth just those things.

Businesses have said again and again that what they value most is critical thinking and problem solving abilities.  Is there a way to measure that?

So let’s get this straight.  Colleges tuitions are going up much faster than inflation.  This is driven by the vast sums being shoveled into the system by the government.  The whole house of cards is sustained by this belief that getting a college degree will get you a better standard of living than not getting one.  We also believe that the cost is worth the results.  The problem is, there is very little actual evidence to support this belief.  Some of the evidence even suggests otherwise.

Once enough people decide not to go to college or pursue alternate skills training, the bubble will pop.  When it does it will be worse than the housing bubble. Ker-POW!

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• Trust Us’ Won’t Cut It Anymore – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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  study that shows many people graduating from college don’t learn anything. Dang.

  tags: education highered study profound nell

  • “Trust us.”

    That’s the only answer colleges ever provide when asked how much their students learn.

  • Still, “trust us,” they say: Everyone who walks across our graduation stage has completed a rigorous course of study. We don’t need to systematically evaluate student learning. Indeed, that would violate the academic freedom of our highly trained faculty, each of whom embodies the proud scholarly traditions of this venerable institution.
  • Now we know that those are lies.
  • Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, recently completed a study of how much 2,300 statistically representative undergraduates—who enrolled as freshmen in a diverse group of 24 colleges and universities in 2005—had learned by the time they (in theory) were ready to graduate, in 2009. As a measuring tool, the researchers used the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a respected test of analytic reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication skills. Their findings were published this month in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) and in an accompanying white paper. It is, remarkably, the first study of its kind.
  • Their finding? Forty-five percent of students made no gains on the CLA during their first two years in college. Thirty-six percent made no gains over the entire four years. They learned nothing. On average, students improved by less than half a standard deviation in four years. “American higher education,” the researchers found, “is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”
  • The study also found significant differences by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not.
  • Financial aid also matters. The study found that students whose financial aid came primarily in the form of grants learned more than those who were paying mostly with loans.
  • Learning was also negatively correlated with­—surprise—time spent in fraternities and sororities.
  • The study makes clear that there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with hard work. They learn some things worth knowing. The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning. Others don’t get even that.
  • the higher-education system must seem like a gigantic confidence game, with students and colleges conspiring to produce hollow degrees that nonetheless define the boundaries of opportunity.
  • The study suggests that we have overcomplicated the practice of higher education. It comes down to what it always has—deep engagement with complex ideas and texts, difficult and often solitary study, the discipline to write, revise, and write again. What students need most aren’t additional social opportunities and elaborate services. They need professors who assign a lot of reading and writing.

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