College is Too Easy

Bird Dog links to Mark Bauerlein's discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's research on student learning and college performance. And that reminds me of the Arum and Roksa piece that ran in Friday's Los Angeles Times, "College, too easy for its own good":

We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.

Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.

The students themselves must bear some of the blame for this, of course. Improvement in thinking and writing skills requires academic engagement; simply hanging out on a college campus for multiple years isn't enough. Yet at many institutions, that seems to be sufficient to earn a degree. At many schools, students can choose from a menu of easy programs and classes that allow them to graduate without having received a rigorous college education. Colleges are complicit, in that they reward students with high grades for little effort. Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16.

To be sure, there were many exceptions to this dismal portrait of the state of undergraduate learning. Some academic programs and colleges are quite rigorous, and some students we followed pushed themselves and excelled. In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains. So too did students attending more selective colleges. In addition, at every college and university examined, we found some students who were applying themselves and learning at impressive levels.

These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality education.

There's more, especially the discussion of why higher education got off track. Still, it'd be worth checking the book itself, for in my experience it's the absence of skills and the culture of anti-intellectualism that's most detrimental to college learning. I'm tempted to say I struggled with maintaining high standards when I first started at LBCC. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. Over time experience has shown how I can better maintain high standards AND improve student performance (it requires intensely personalized instruction, which is hard to do with hundreds of students). That said, I'm less rigid than I was 8 or 9 years ago, and in some cases that means I'm just plain easier (flexibility is key, which sometimes might mean "easier"). Professors are dealing with a range of abilities starting with students who'd be doing just fine at Berkeley or UCLA to those who can barely string a couple of correct sentences together. I'm sad sometimes when I meet students who literally can't read. I largely quit having students do expository reading in class (reading aloud) because I felt bad for the students who struggled to read through a paragraph from the textbook. It's not one particular demographic in particular, although a lot of Latino students are ESL and a lot of blacks demonstrate something of a stunted degree of formal learning, and I'm talking rudimentary basic skills acquisition. And worse, with the exception of the odd student here or there, black kids generally don't seem to care. (Don't even get me going about the black student athletes.)