Review of "Academically Adrift"

I wrote this for the CCCU Advance magazine.

Sometimes a book comes along that crystallizes much of what people have intuited to be true but that they haven’t yet been able to substantiate or put into words. This is such a book. Most of us in higher education have this innate sense that something is amiss in our ivory towers. We’re just not sure what that “something” is. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa do us the great service of bringing together disparate pieces of evidence that have been accumulating over the years and combining it with their own painstaking research in order to give us a much clearer picture of some of the problems confronting us.

And problems there are aplenty, as the title would imply. The authors are circumspect, however, in not criticizing the entire higher education apparatus. In fact, they repeatedly argue that the current system “works” quite well. Just not for the reasons, or the people, that most of us typically imagine. Students are mostly happy with their college experiences, faculty are mostly satisfied with their academic pursuits, and various external constituents are mostly content with what they see being accomplished.

But amidst this general approval, are students actually learning? For the vast majority, the answer appears to be “no.” The authors rely heavily on the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment to argue their case, and there are potential problems with putting so much weight on a single assessment instrument, especially one that focuses only on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. College is certainly about more than just these things, and the CLA data does not provide definite answers on even this narrow range of learning outcomes.

Nevertheless, the CLA is probably the best we have, and the results the authors cull from this data are both compelling and corroborated by other evidence that they have amassed. Furthermore, all colleges and universities would say that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are at the heart of the higher education enterprise.

So what went wrong to sideline in practice what in theory should be our main endeavors? From my perspective, the authors are dead on when it comes to the proximate cause and completely off the mark when it comes to the ultimate cause for our having gone “adrift.” The short term culprit is clearly a lack of academic rigor, which by all accounts has declined precipitously in recent decades, especially in comparison to developments in other countries and especially outside of the rarified air of the elite liberal arts institutions.
• “College students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activities.”
• “Only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying.”
• “Fifty percent of students in our [representative] sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.”
In other words, if there is one thing that we as educators can do to provide better direction to this “adrift” academic culture, it would be to provide more impetus for a challenging curriculum.

So why don’t we? Here’s where I believe the authors themselves are adrift in their analysis. They astutely, and understandably given their backgrounds as sociologists, focus on a change in “culture” as the problem. They even note that there used to be both a moral and academic function in higher education, but that once the moral function was discarded, the remaining academic function was fragmented into whatever served the needs of each constituent. A “disengagement compact” took over in which each party wanted more or less to be left alone.

While recognizing and bemoaning the loss of central moral authority that has resulted in this “adrift” culture, the authors clearly don’t share our Christian understanding of how the integration of faith and learning can help restore that sense of order. Their proposed solution, therefore, is to substitute “moral” force with “political” force, i.e. to have the federal government impose testing and accountability standards for higher education along the lines of what “No Child Left Behind” has done for K-12 education. A worse and more unlikely prescription would be hard to imagine.

The sour ending of this book, however, should not put us off to the fruits of the main arguments about the ways in which our higher education culture has become “adrift.” This is an important book that should provoke some valuable conversations at the local and national levels.