Late each summer, soon after excited new students arrive at four-year colleges across the country, deans try to sober them up. Some warn that successful students spend “three hours studying outside of class for each hour spent in class.” For at least one moment, students get the impression that they must work hard—more than 40 hours per week—to succeed.
But a funny thing happens on the way to graduation. The average student spends approximately 27 hours per week on academic work and receives high grades anyway. The students profiled here by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa graduated “with an average of a 3.33,” a little better than B-plus, “despite low levels of academic engagement.” Such students have reason to think that they have accomplished much and to be optimistic about their futures. But because little has been asked of them, many are ill-prepared for post-college life. As one recent graduate says, “I’m feeling OK about the way my life is going. It would be cool if I had a job.”
She is no outlier. “Almost one quarter of the college graduates” Arum and Roksa followed in their research are “living back at home with their parents two years after finishing college”; but a “stunning 95 percent reported that their lives would be the same or better than those of their parents.” Graduates “who were working in unskilled jobs, and even those who were currently unemployed, were as optimistic as their counterparts who were working or employed in better jobs.”
Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Roksa, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, are not so optimistic. They have already contributed to the higher education debate with Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011). Arum and Roksa used the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), “a measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication,” to determine how much students improve in those skills over the first two years of college. The answer, at least for the more than 2,300 students at 24 colleges and universities they considered, was “uh oh.”
Take an incoming student who scores in the 50th percentile on the CLA. Two years and $50,000 later, sit him down with a group of incoming freshmen similar to those he first sat with. He will now be in the 57th percentile. That’s underwhelming; and, of course, others gain less. At least with respect to the kind of learning the CLA measures, gains were “exceedingly small or empirically non-existent” for many students. Aspiring Adults Adrift follows part of the Academically Adrift cohort up to graduation, and two years beyond, in order to learn how they are doing in a poor economy and how “post college outcomes [are] associated with collegiate experience and academic performance.”
The news is still bad. By the end of senior year, the average student has made only modest progress in the critical thinking and writing skills the CLA measures. Recall where we left our example student at the end of his sophomore year: not good enough to break out of the middle of a pack of recent high school graduates. Four years of college have moved him into the 68th percentile of a similar pack.
Low CLA scores, even after controlling for other factors, such as institutional selectivity and major, are associated with negative job market outcomes. Low-scoring graduates, compared with high-scorers, are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to lose a job if they have one, and more likely to work in an unskilled occupation. Senior CLA performance is “associated with the likelihood of success in the job market two years after . . . graduation.”
Of course, it’s possible that colleges can’t do more to teach the skills the CLA measures. Perhaps critical thinking, like IQ, is hard to budge very much. But Arum and Roksa come as close as one can to demonstrating that we can do better. Students who attend highly selective colleges improve more on the CLA than students who attend less selective ones, “even when models are adjusted for students’ background and academic characteristics.” Moreover, Arum and Roksa note, education researchers Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini have presented strong evidence that critical thinking gains in college a few decades ago were, on average, about double what they are now.
That decline may be related to another decline. Labor economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock have shown that the number of hours college students spend on academics has dropped dramatically: “Students in 1961 devoted 40 hours per week to academics, whereas full-time students in 2004 invested about 27 hours per week.” This finding cannot be explained by changes in the composition of student bodies. Study time has fallen “for students from all demographic subgroups . . . for students who worked in college and those who did not,” and “at four-year colleges of every type.” Indeed, the average student in Arum and Roksa’s sample “studie[d] alone little more than an hour per day.”
Yet even “students who reported studying alone less than five hours per week had a 3.2 grade point average.” Arum and Roksa think colleges have lowered standards for several reasons. First, a “student service” approach, in which “social engagement, extracurricular activities, and group learning” promote “social sensitivity, sociability, and interpersonal competencies,” has existed since the 1920s. More recent trends, including the “broader cultural adoption of a therapeutic ethic,” “changes in college financing” that leave colleges competing to satisfy student preferences, and the use of course evaluations, which imposes costs on demanding instructors, have helped crowd out “rigorous academic study.”
Although Arum and Roksa emphasize skills and devote a chapter to jobs, they are at least as concerned with character development and the “larger lessons learned and internalized through student experiences with school structure, relationships with educators, and interaction with adult authorities.” When adults accommodate the preferences of the young rather than challenging them, and when teachers “reward minimal effort with high grades,” they leave their charges adrift in more ways than one.
Arum and Roksa do not, for the most part, blame professors and administrators who are swimming with very powerful currents, including “[w]idespread cultural commitment to consumer choice . . . self fulfillment and sociability.” The “serious promotion of student learning” under these circumstances requires considerable “courage and commitment.”
I share Arum and Roksa’s view that “many stakeholders” are already fully engaged in the effort to “commit their institutions to programs to improve student learning.” But others may need their spines stiffened. In 2004, Princeton, responding to substantial grade inflation, sought to limit the proportion of A-range grades awarded to 35 percent. Princeton is not tuition dependent and has no serious competition for attracting America’s best students. It can do what it wants. Yet a faculty committee has recommended (with the support of university president Christopher Eisgruber) that the 2004 policy be rolled back, in part because students dislike it. It adds “a large element of stress to students’ lives, making them feel as though they are competing for a limited resource of A grades.”
Heaven forbid.
Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.
