Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (review)

I read this book while en route to the celebration for the retirement of Dr. Paul Piazza, my high school English teacher and one of the most influential teachers I ever had. In his class and many others at St. Albans, 16-18 year olds regularly exceeded this book's benchmarks of demanding college instruction, reading more than 40 pages a week per class and writing more-than-20-page papers routinely. In fact, even the D.C. public junior high school I attended made greater demands on students. Juxtaposing these secondary school demands and this book's limited vision of accomplishment nurtured a resigned disappointment with the volume.

With high hopes I opened Academically Adrift at wheels up. I expected a tight, focused, critical analysis of the impediments to intellectual work on college campuses today, and perhaps even an inspiring, agenda-setting closing chapter. I expected a tight argument because, setting aside appendices, endnotes and the index, the book is only 144 pages. And, knowing the hallway conversations I have shared with the authors at conferences, I expected to be challenged by deep insights and burning questions.

The book starts out promisingly. Key players are introduced. We learn of increasingly diverse students, busy faculty, non-scholar administrators and increasingly varied institutions. We are informed as to the major innovation upon which the book relies, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a seemingly better standardized test, better because instead of marking multiple choice bubbles students write essays that are graded for their complexity of thought. The aim of the CLA, administered at the start of college and again sophomore year, is to assess whether students have obtained critical thinking skills before and during their college career.

After this introductory chapter the book presents results of several regression models (using graphs of predicted values) to convey important associations with change in the CLA score. Chapter 2 considers the antecedents to college entry and their relation to the CLA, while Chapter 3 further explores students' experience at school and its relation to the CLA. The fourth chapter delves into institutional factors associated with CLA scores.

There are a few surprises and interesting findings. For example, although bowling alone may be damaging, studying alone is far better than studying with others in producing cognitive growth. Spending time outside of class with faculty is uncommon and unrelated to cognitive growth. Socioeconomic gaps in CLA score do not decline during college. Further, the book nicely separates a focus on student retention and cognitive growth, pointing out that many efforts for the former undermine the latter.

Still, I found the book disappointing, and the basic reason for the disappointment is that the book strikes out for new territory, but in doing so fails to marshal its own critical faculties, producing several questionable analytic decisions that undermine the basis for all but the most obvious of claims. Most faculty don't need anyone to tell them that their students de-prioritize academic pursuits, and despite some stellar class performances the general trend is downward and has been for a long time. One scarcely needs any kind of systematic analysis at all to discern that glaring reality. The systematicity is needed, however, in determining the related factors and possible causes of this condition. And it is this task the analytic decisions greatly undermine.

A few examples illustrate the problem. First, to determine whether schools matter for cognitive growth the study considered faculty demands, measured by students' report of whether they had ever taken a class that required either 40 or more pages of reading a week or more than a 20-page paper. In a study of student disengagement using those possibly disengaged students to report what their teachers are demanding is indefensible. For all we know every single student in the sample had multiple classes exceeding these modest demands, but the only students who realized it were those paying attention, which would explain their comparatively better performance. Many (most?) faculty...