Academically Adrift, the follow up

The authors of Academically Adrift (much discussed here last year) have released the findings of a follow up study concerning critical thinking, civic engagement, and post-collegiate employment. This looks like more good news for philosophy (if philosophy engenders critical thinking and civic engagement at least!) and bad news for business students:

"A normal student nowadays"?

In an evenhanded review of a number of recent books on higher education, including Academically Adrift, Anthony Grafton identifies a variety of factors that converge to create the current worrisome state of higher ed in the U.S.

This paragraph hit me hard, as a sad truth about the situation of many students:

Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops. It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes.

Liberal arts and the narrowness of 'business education'

I've always been skeptical about the notion of a business major: As I've joked with a colleague of mine, business programs could easily be renamed 'White Collar Studies'. It's long struck me as a generic major, what students choose when they want a college degree, but not in anything particular. As this NYT article puts it, it's now the default major for those who see their education in purely instrumental terms, as a long stint of internship or networking that positions them for their first post-college job. Nowadays 1 in 5 students is a business major, and another concern is just how seriously universities take business education. From the NYT article:

...with large student-faculty ratios and no lab equipment, business has historically been cheaper to operate than most departments. Cynics say many colleges are content.  “At the big public universities, the administrations need us to be credible, but I’m not sure that they need us to be very good,” says J. David Hunger, a scholar-in-residence in the management program at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minn. “They need us to be cash cows.” 

And lastly, as our Academically Adrift series highlighted, academic rigor is a definite issue. This graphic says it all.

But thankfully, the trend in undergrad business education seems to be in the direction of integrating more liberal arts into the business curriculum. IHE reports today on a Carnegie study that concludes

that a more concerted focus on teaching students a set of modes of thinking commonly associated with a liberal arts education – analytical thinking, exploration of issues from different perspectives, reflective exploration of meaning, and practical reasoning -- can greatly improve business education.

Academically Adrift part 6: Modelling the teaching culture on the research culture

The main structural explanation for the discouraging findings of Academically Adrift is the 'disengagement compact,' so eloquently described here previously by Becko. Students, faculty, administrators, parents, politicians, and the public have struck a bargain that, in light of the various incentives each of these constituencies is subject to, results in lowered expectations, diminished engagement, and of course, less learning. As Chris observes, with the possible exception of those rare learning-oriented students, none of these constituencies has much motivation to break this tacit compact.

And yet, to a last, we here at ISW have been bemoaning the disengagement compact and envisioning ways, at both the institutional and individual level, to resist or unravel the compact. (This strikes me as a theme throughout our AA reading group.) The fact that the teachers who post and comment here sense (and resent!) the presence of the compact tells us that, of these constituencies, faculty are most likely to find the disengagement compact a bitter bargain.

Academically Adrift Part 5: When College Education Absolutely Has to Work

 I had a surreal experience teaching philosophy once. I was applying for a temporary job and got invited down to give a sample class. It was an introduction to ethics class and the reading was chosen ahead of time (Epictetus's Enchiridion). And when I got there to teach the class, every student was on-time, patient, and ruthlessly prepared. They'd read all of Epictetus, written down questions about his position, challenges to his position, and connections to other topics in the moral philosophy they'd read so far. In class, after my brief introduction, there was a  mini-competition amongst students to see who could impress me the most with his or her preparedness and help his or her fellow students at the same time. It was incredible. I'd walked into a classroom at the United States Coast Guard Academy.

I didn't end up taking the job. The hours were too demanding for a grad student in the last stages of his thesis. But it was all I could think about when I was reading Chapter 4. I don't think college professors needed to be told that students are spending less and less time on studying and other learning related activities. But it's nice that Arum and Roska actually give us numbers. That 75% of student time is spent either socializing or sleeping tells volumes about the amount of learning one can expect. It's not the worst theory to guess that classes with "rigor" (basically extensive requirements backed up by a credible threat of doing very poorly in the class) work the magic they do because they give strong incentives to take a little time back from the 75% and redirect it to academic work.

Academically Adrift Part 4: A Call to Arms

In all of the previous threads we've started on Academically Adrift, there's a common theme: the crisis in higher education and the need for us to wake up to it, analyze it, and figure out some solutions. Becko says that there's a "disengagement compact" (I like this phrase) in which parties are given incentives not to ask for, demand, or offer good teaching; Mike says that part of the problem is that we don't recognize the desperate need to institute virtues into the curriculum, and Jason, mindful of the crisis, wants us to be careful in our attempt to capture "good teaching" (it's not something that can be captured simply in quantitative terms), pointing out that we also need the humility to acknowledge that many undergraduate teachers simply do not know how to teach well.

That's a lot to chew on. To be honest (and I'm in agreement with all of their concerns), it's a bit depressing and overwhelming! The problems are so large and systemic that it's hard to imagine any way out. Below the fold, after a brief overview of what I take to be the main claim of the book, I want to move to a more empowering subject: how to take some stabs at fixing the problem. I don't have a lot of solutions, but I know where, as teachers, we need to devote our attentions: tenure and promotions procedures. Let's talk about them.

Academically Adrift: Three Easy Questions; Three Not So Easy Answers

Question 1: What is the CLA

The CLA is the “Collegiate Learning Assessment” of The Council for Aid to Education and is the primary tool for the findings of Academically Adrift (AA). The Council for Aid to Education (CAE) is a national, nonprofit organization established in 1952 designed to advance the corporate support of education, to conduct policy research on higher education, to improve the quality of and access to education, and to conduct research on and promote policy reforms related to education. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a national attempt “to assess the quality of undergraduate education by directly measuring student learning outcomes.” The CLA is a performance-based assessment model, developed by CAE, that directly measures the quality of learning in undergraduate education “that all of the major stakeholders - university administrators, faculty, students, parents, employers, and policy makers - can use as part of their evaluation of academic programs.” The CLA is in many regards a considerable resource for gathering information regarding student learning.

Academically Adrift, Not for Profit in NY Review of Books

I can't exactly recommend Peter Brooks' review of the two books we've recently done reading groups on here at ISW. It strikes me as cranky and out of touch, and in the case of Academically Adrift, dismissive and careless in its reading:

Academically Adrift Part 2: The Moral Function of the University

One of my initial responses to Academically Adrift (AA) was a form of despair. It is the feeling I’ve had at times in the classroom as 30 faces stare back at me (or at the ground, or at the cell phone they’re trying to hide under their desk) when I ask a question about the assigned reading, and it appears that at best a handful of students have even attempted to do that reading. It is tempting to become cynical, or bitter, or to simply throw up our hands in resignation. But if we desire to pursue excellence as philosophy teachers, we need to overcome these temptations. And one way to do that is to take on what seems like an even more monumental task than encouraging students to work—we may need to attempt to help our students become better human beings.

If Aristotle was right that one’s childhood is very important with respect to the task of embodying virtue as an adult, then some of the points raised in AA paint a bleak picture. Students who come to college primarily for a social experience and career credential may not see the value in grappling with difficult ideas and concepts, reading at least 40 pages a week and writing longer papers. Why undergo the sometimes painful and often difficult process of developing intellectual virtue when the point of college is to obtain a credential and have some fun? If all of the involved parties are supporting this approach, to varying extents, it will be that much more difficult to change the mind of the student to the extent that he or she engages in the necessary behavior for growth in intellectual virtue and critical thinking skills.

There are other issues in play here, as the authors of AA point out. Many PhD’s see themselves as independent professionals and are not concerned with advancing any particular institution, i.e. there is a lack of institutional loyalty which can be problematic. Related to this, according to Arum and Roksa a primary incentive driving faculty research “is a quasi-religious commitment to embracing research as a ‘vocational calling’" (Kindle location 289). The motive is not financial reward, at least for many and perhaps for most faculty. Clearly this is the case for philosophers, as our work very rarely populates any best-seller list. Perhaps we ought to take teaching to be a part of this calling as well. I won’t pursue this more here, given a previous discussion at ISW.

Academically Adrift Part I: The Disengagement Compact

In Academically Adrift (hereafter, AA), Arum and Roksa identify a phenomenon that I assume we all know all too well. George Kuh calls it the disengagement compact (AA, 5). Faculty and students strike a bargain - a rather expensive one. The bargain is one in which teachers agree to ask little of students while providing an entertaining simulation of teaching and good grades, and in which students agree to ask little of teachers while providing compliant behavior and a routine simulation of learning. The teacher is rewarded with time and good student evaluations and the student is rewarded with time and a good GPA.

Who among us would admit to striking such a bargain? Not I. But as Arum and Roksa point out, the bargain is not struck among individuals, nor is it struck in a vacuum. As teachers, we enter an educational system in which this bargain has already been struck collectively. In addition, the bargain is but one among a complex web of tacit agreements among students, faculty, administrators, parents, politicians and government agencies: parents want their children to live in a pleasant, safe environment while becoming more mature and independent; students want a socially engaging college experience; parents and students alike want a credential; professors want a regular, secure salary and time for research; administrators want measurable improvements in student (consumer) satisfaction; politicians want practical outcomes; government agencies want practical, technological innovation. None of the members privy to this agreement have undergraduate student learning as a priority (AA, 124-5).

"It's what's in your cart that counts"

I'm really looking forward to our Academically Adrift reading group next week. I came across this nice analogy from Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art:

Of course some students don’t expect a return on their college investment in the form of learning. Their aim is to acquire a credential. When I talk about these matters with my students, I make an analogy to shopping at the supermarket. If the point is merely to get a receipt and get out, it makes perfect sense to grab something, anything, and head to the shortest line. No waiting on Register Four! But having something to show for your effort is another matter. And if everyone has a receipt, it’s what’s in your cart — or what you take away from your education — that counts.

Aso, here's a good interview with Richard Arum, the book's co-author, from Minnesota Public Radio.

Next week we're adrift

A reminder: Our online discussion group of the buzzworthy 'Academically Adrift' is scheduled to start on Monday the 28th. We hope all our readers join the discussion. Here are some sources for the book:
Amazon,  U. Chicago Press (Note: there are HTML and Google previews of the book at the Chicago site.)