Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (review)

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses appears at a crucial time for higher education. Not only has the cost of a college education increased drastically over the past decade, but many have questioned whether a college education is for everyone. This study examines how much learning occurs in the first two years of the undergraduate experience at a time when higher education is experiencing pressure to provide “practical majors” that will bring a quick return on an educational investment.

The first two years, however, are often premised on the idea that students need to build their skills as competent thinkers, readers, and writers before entering their majors. On the surface, the humanities, along with science and math, fared well in the study, but it’s important to thoroughly discuss the book’s research, basic premises, and conclusions, all of which have far-reaching implications for the academic community.

The book focuses on student performance in the first two years of their undergraduate education. The researchers sought to determine how much students learned during their general studies programs. The basic premise of the research is that, if 99% of college and university mission statements claim that the development of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are paramount to an undergraduate education, then research should be able to demonstrate that students are, in fact, developing these skills. Instead of using internal assessments, the researchers used the CLA (the Collegiate Learning Assessment), which consists of an open-ended performance task and two analytical writing assignments that access critical thinking.

According to their results, 45% of the students in the study demonstrated no significant gains in the development of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing during their first three semesters. While those of us in the humanities should take advantage of these findings to remind the public that our disciplines are contributing to the achievement of the university’s stated goals and mission, other findings go beyond our own departmental and disciplinary agendas. The most salient observations of the report tell us about problems that we will face in the future when college graduates will have to confront a gap between expectations and realization.

In regard to this lack of progress, researchers assign responsibility to all of the stakeholders in higher education: students, professors, high schools, universities, administrators, and society at large. According to the study, faculty and administrators contribute to the problem. At the university level, these concerns appeared in Ernest Boyer’s work as early as the 1980s. Boyer was concerned that many colleges were changing their focus from the student to the professor, from general to specialized education, and from loyalty to campus to loyalty to the profession (7). As a result, success in the classroom was reframed as positive student evaluations, which does not necessarily translate into academic rigor and intellectual challenges for students.

One of the most disturbing premises of the study is that students come to the university poorly prepared for demanding academic tasks, and they also enter with “attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment” (3). The authors refer to these students as “drifting dreamers” who have high ambitions and expectation, but no clear idea of how to achieve them and little comprehension of the effort involved. This trend is also evidenced by the drift away from an academic focus to a lifestyle focus. Arum and Roksa describe the resulting mentalities of “persistence over performance” and “credentialism,” then conclude that these approaches have transformed a college education into a commodity.

The failure of many young people to take advantage of this time to develop their skills in critical thinking, complex problem solving, and writing, is our failure, too. Education in the United States was supposed to be the great leveler; it was supposed to be a means through which women, African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and any other underprivileged group could carve out...