Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Arum is professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also director of the Education Research Program of the Social Science Research Council and the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools. Josipa Roksa is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

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Academically Adrift

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................ix1 College Cultures and Student Learning.............................12 Origins and Trajectories..........................................333 Pathways through Colleges Adrift..................................594 Channeling Students' Energies toward Learning.....................915 A Mandate for Reform..............................................121Methodological Appendix.............................................145Notes...............................................................213Bibliography........................................................237Index...............................................................249

Chapter One

"Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should," the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, recently lamented. Many students graduate college today, according to Bok, "without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers ... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems." While concern over undergraduate learning in this country has longstanding roots, in recent years increased attention has been focused on this issue not only by former Ivy League presidents, but also by policy makers, practitioners, and the public. Stakeholders in the higher education system have increasingly come to raise questions about the state of collegiate learning for a diverse set of reasons. Legislators—and privately, middle-class parents as well—increasingly have expressed worry over the value and returns to their investments in higher education. Business leaders have begun to ask whether graduates have acquired the necessary skills to ensure economic competitiveness. And increasingly, educators within the system itself have begun to raise their voices questioning whether organizational changes to colleges and universities in recent decades have undermined the core educational functions of these institutions.

These diverse concerns about the state of undergraduate education have served to draw attention to measuring whether students are actually developing the capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning at college. In a rapidly changing economy and society, there is widespread agreement that these individual capacities are the foundation for effective democratic citizenship and economic productivity. "With all the controversy over the college curriculum," Derek Bok has commented, "it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education." Institutional mission statements also echo this widespread commitment to developing students' critical thinking. They typically include a pledge, for example, that schools will work to challenge students to "think critically and intuitively," and to ensure that graduates will become adept at "critical, analytical, and logical thinking." These mission statements align with the idea that educational institutions serve to enhance students' human capital—knowledge, skills, and capacities that will be rewarded in the labor market. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, for example, have recently argued that increased investment in U.S. higher education attainment is required for both economic growth and reduced economic inequality. Goldin and Katz's recommendations rest on the assumption that increased college graduation rates will likely have such desirable economic outcomes because the labor market values "the highly analytical individual who can think abstractly." But what if increased educational attainment is not equivalent to enhanced individual capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning?

While there has been a dearth of systematic longitudinal research on the topic, there are ample reasons to worry about the state of undergraduate learning in higher education. Policy makers and practitioners have increasingly become apprehensive about undergraduate education as there is growing evidence that individual and institutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate academic learning per se. While as social scientists we want to avoid the pitfalls of either propagating historically inaccurate sentimental accounts of a romantic collegiate past followed by a tragic "fall from grace" or, alternatively, scape-goating students, faculty, and colleges for the current state of affairs, it is imperative to provide a brief description of the historical, social, and institutional context in which the phenomenon under investigation manifests itself to illuminate its multifaceted dimensions.

Higher Education Context: Continuity and Change

Historians have noted that from the inception of U.S. colleges, many students often embraced a collegiate culture that had little to do with academic learning. While some students who used colleges to prepare for the ministry "avoided the hedonism and violence of their rowdy classmates" and focused on academic pursuits rather than extracurricular activities, the majority of students chose another path. For many students in past decades, college was a time when one "forged a peer consciousness sharply at odds with that of the faculty and of serious students." Undergraduates as a whole historically embraced a college life—complete with fraternities, clubs, and social activities—that was produced, shaped, and defined by a peer culture oriented to nonacademic endeavors.

Sociologists have long cautioned about the detrimental effects of peer cultures on an individual's commitment to academic pursuits in general and student learning in particular. Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but—more troubling still—they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment. In recent cohorts of students, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have described the prevalence of "drifting dreamers" with "high ambitions, but no clear life plans for reaching them." These students "have limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demand for these occupations." They enter college, we believe, largely academically adrift.

While prior historical scholarship reminds us that U.S. undergraduates have long been devoted to pursuing social interests at college, there is emerging empirical evidence that suggests that college students' academic effort has dramatically declined in recent decades. Labor economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, for example, have recently conducted critically important empirical work that meticulously examines data from twelve individual-level surveys of student time use from the 1920s to today. They have found that full-time college students through the early 1960s spent roughly forty hours per week on academic pursuits (i.e., combined studying and class time); at which point a steady decline ensued throughout the following decades. Today, full-time college students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic...