Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (review)

Semester after semester, year after year, undergraduate education continues as it has, basically unchanged, for many years. But, maintains Derek Bok, business as usual means that important objectives continue to be unmet. As he acknowledges, Bok is hardly the first student of American higher education to point out perceived serious deficiencies and to propose remedies. Unlike almost all the other critics, however, he does not limit his focus to the leading research universities and the most prestigious colleges (for a view from the other side of the tracks, I recommend Caesar's Traveling Through the Boondocks).

This book's central theme is that our colleges and universities accomplish far less for their students than they should. Furthermore, most of the causes of this deficiency are not being seriously addressed. Has the quality of teaching improved? Are students learning more than they did in, say, 1950? Can they write better? Analyze problems more rigorously? "The honest answer to these questions is that we do not know. In fact, we do not even have an informed guess that can command general agreement," Bok writes (p. 30).

A factor significantly contributing to this problem is the absence of an overarching purpose for the undergraduate curriculum. Faculties among and within colleges and universities have clung to different visions of what undergraduate education should entail and produce. Perhaps the most pervasive divide is between those involved in vocational education and those in the liberal arts. An additional issue is whether undergraduate education should concern itself with promoting certain values and behaviors. Does that constitute unacceptable indoctrination?

Bok maintains that the key problem is that neither faculties nor their deans and presidents feel the need to continuously discover better ways of educating their students, not to be confused with faddism (Birnbaum, 2000). From a behavioral analytic perspective, this is quite understandable; the costs (in terms of time, effort, and money) involved in trying to significantly improve undergraduate education are outweighed by the benefits of business as usual.

There are, says Bok, at least six tendencies that warrant explicit attention if undergraduate education is to be improved. He describes these in chapter 2. The purposes that undergraduate education should serve are outlined in chapter 3, and Bok goes on to consider these in greater detail in the following eight chapters.

The first purpose Bok considers is learning to communicate in writing and in speaking. "Few courses in the college curriculum have as much potential to offer lasting benefits to so many undergraduates" as do speech and composition courses (p. 108). As he does with the other seven purposes, Bok describes not only the importance of the purpose but also why it is seldom achieved. Teaching writing is hard, time-consuming work. But, says Bok, most deans, English departments, and senior faculties continue to underestimate its difficulty. The results of teaching writing are usually not evaluated with any rigor (a problem not unique by any means to teaching writing), and such courses are avoided by most faculty and are taught by adjuncts and graduate students who have no particular training in such teaching and who are typically minimally supervised.

Furthermore, no single composition course can transform undergraduates into skillful writers. They must be required to write and to receive feedback in other courses. Recognizing this, many colleges initiated "Writing Across the Curriculum" in the 1970s. Such programs, however, never took root in a majority of colleges, and they now exist in little more than one third of all colleges. The current state of the writing curriculum illustrates a larger problem: "the all-too-frequent tendency to pronounce a goal important enough to justify a required course without devoting the effort or the resources needed to make the enterprise a success" (p. 101).

As a solution to the problem, Bok recommends that, rather than trying to force reluctant faculty to teach writing composition...