Higher education debate misguided

The American system of higher education, it seems, is in danger of under-serving its respective student bodies, or so the litany of charges leveled against it would have you believe. In recent months, a number of findings have been cast against the general performance of college students in America, including the equally unsettling notions that students spend 75 percent of their time sleeping and socializing and that the average time spent studying has decreased from 40 hours a week in 1961 to 27 hours a week in 2003.

Just over a week ago, the University of Chicago Press released “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” a scathing indictment of the American institution of higher education co-written by New York University professor of sociology Richard Arum and University of Virginia assistant professor of sociology Josipa Roksa. The book reports on a study of over 2,000 students at 24 unnamed four-year colleges. The group is said to be “geographically and institutionally representative of the full range of American higher education.” The students were evaluated three times over the course of their schooling solely based their performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment test, which is a popular examination designed to test reading and writing skills.

In short, the study found that 36% of participants “saw no statistically significant gain sin their CLA scores” over the course of their four years in college, and that students spent, on average, fewer than 13 hours per week on their studies, which amounts to, in a generous estimate, a puzzling two hours a day. As alarming as these metrics might be, they aren’t reason enough to head for the hills quite yet, and they have already come under heavy fire from critics. Director of the National Survey of Student Engagement Alexander McCormick told The Chronicle of Higher Education that “if you did a similar study and administered subject-area GRE tests to students in their freshman and senior years, I expect that we would see a lot better results.”

There are a multitude of theories as to why studies of the American higher education system routinely return such poor results—research priorities for professors, apathetic student bodies, subpar high school education—but Arum’s response to McCormick’s charge unknowingly stumbles to the bottom of it. “Thirty-five percent of students report that they spend five or fewer hours per week studying alone,” he said. “Do we really think that there is going to be a lot of subject-specific learning when students are giving so little effort?”

There are a number of problems with this interpretation of the situation, the least of which is Arum’s assertion that raw effort and hours logged equate to scholastic performance. More importantly, though, does it really come as any surprise that one third of students don’t study all that much?

In a nation where college is often pursued more as an acquiescence to societal norms and family expectations than as a gateway to increase of intellect, an overburdening of the education system is inevitable. According to the Alliance for Excellent Education and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of all students in America graduate from high school on time and, of those who graduate, another 70 percent go on to enroll in colleges and universities. This swelling of the national student body, cited by some as a long-term effect of the 1944 GI Bill which provided college education for World War II veterans, is largely inextricable from the relatively recent democratization of higher education. This is, specifically, the notion that a college education should be made available to any student with passable grades and the inclination to attain a degree. And, although that’s certainly an admirable ideology, it’s also probably the reason for which the United States falls behind, both relative to its national competitors and the expectations of its own citizens, in studies of college education.

None of this is meant to place a value judgment on the soaring accessibility to university education in America, as it means very little when taken on its own. Elite institutions that place a heavy premium on intellectualism will continue to serve as harbors for those interested in the insulation of academia, while the growing crowd of more generalized institutions will present themselves to the masses. The evolution of American higher education, therefore, does not necessitate the state of emergency mentality that runs rampant in today’s media: It requires instead only that we take numbers and studies with a grain of salt and recognize that the methods of evaluation at the center of these studies may in fact be more flawed than the subjects themselves.

Chris Bassil is a Trinity junior. His column runs every Friday.