A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, offers refreshing insights into the problems plaguing higher education. Based on information from over 2,000 students on 24 United States campuses, Academically Adrift paints a disturbing picture of the failures of modern education.
In short, students are not working hard enough:
- Students are not spending enough hours studying : only 12-14 per week. Most of that time is spent in “group” study sessions that are little more peer socializing with a veneer of self-deceptive justification that studying might be occurring. The study also found that solo studiers fared better.
- Students are not learning enough in some majors. Business majors, for example, showed far fewer educational gains than those in liberal arts. This reflects the non-academic, vocational emphasis of business courses compared to the intellectual challenges offered by courses in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy.
- Students are not being required to read or write enough. This is hardly a surprise, considering that so many college students are unable to form even basic ideas into coherent sentences.
- Students involved in fraternities and sororities learned less. This is, again, no surprise, as such socialization can only detract from time available for studying.
- Arum & Roska’s work concludes with the damning statistic that 45% of students see no improvement in their first two years of college work, and 36% fail to have improvement over all four years of college.
