Academically Adrift

Chapter 2

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While students choose specific fields of study, previous research also suggests that faculty engage in distinct practices across fields. Faculty members in different disciplines value specific domains of knowledge and forms of interaction. Consequently, they structure courses, interact with students, and emphasize and reward distinct interests, abilities, and competencies.46 They also differentially encourage specific educational practices such as faculty-student contact or engagement in active learning, and they are more or less likely to communicate high expectations to students.47 In other words, faculty in different fields create distinct socializing environments which foster development of specific skills, att.i.tudes, and values.48 Perhaps as a product of these socializing experiences (and individual selection into fields), students exhibit different acultures of engagement.a Students in social science and humanities demonstrate engagement by talking to professors outside of cla.s.s, contributing to cla.s.s discussion, and asking questions in lectures. Students in science and engineering fields, on the other hand, place higher value on quant.i.tative skills and cla.s.ses that help to solve problems, and they engage much more with peers (by studying together and helping each other understand course material).49 Given these findings, it may not be surprising that students in some fields perform higher on the CLA than others. The CLA measures a specific set of skillsa"namely critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writinga" that is far from the totality of learning or the full repertoire of skills acquired in higher education. As students both select and are socialized into specific ways of knowing and thinking, they will perform well on the CLA to the extent that their disciplines emphasize the skills a.s.sessed. Moreover, some fields may be focusing more on oral than written communication, and thus while students may be acquiring critical thinking skills, they may not demonstrate them as readily in the written format. And even when students in certain fields do not perform as well on the CLA, this does not mean that they are not gaining valuable skills in other areas. In part, this is why there are certification requirements in fields such as education and health that require students to demonstrate knowledge in an occupationally specific domain.

It would be easy to conclude that students in different fields focus on different sets of skills, only some of which are captured by the CLA, thus leading to the observed differences in CLA performance. However, faculty members across subjects overwhelmingly agree that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing are key skills to be taught in higher education. One could hardly argue that we would not want teachers who are educating our children, or business majors who might be responsible for approving home mortgage loans, to develop the capacity to think critically or reason a.n.a.lytically. Moreover, health majors perform significantly higher on the CLA than do business majors, although both are applied fields. Differences across fields may become more p.r.o.nounced as students immerse themselves more deeply into their chosen majors in the second two years of college. However, presented findings at least raise the question about the extent to which, despite the importance and value of specific skills for different fields, general skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing could and should be developed across the undergraduate curriculum.

Financing College Education and Learning.

Financing higher education is a persistent worry for students, parents, and policymakers. Given the high and rising costs of college, the decreasing availability of adequate grant support, and an increasing reliance on loans, not to mention the current economic crisis, the question of how to pay for college is a constant source of discussion and concern. The research community has partic.i.p.ated in this dialogue by aiming to understand whether certain sources of funding are related to student outcomes, namely persistence and degree attainment. Much of the debate has focused on the role of financial aid, including merit versus need-based aid, in facilitating degree completion. Although many articles have been published on the topic, it is difficult to ascertain the true effects of financial aid because students who receive different types of aid often differ on a number of important but hard-to-measure characteristics. A large-scale experimental study currently conducted by Sara Goldrick-Rab and Douglas Harris at the University of Wisconsina"Madison is poised to provide some more definitive insights into the consequences of financial aid for student outcomes in the near future.

Notwithstanding the debates about causality, which we cannot engage given the observational nature of our study, we explored the relationship between sources of funding (namely grants / scholarships and loans) and studentsa performance on the CLA. We asked students to indicate the percentages of their college costs that were covered by grants, scholarships, and loans. The results indicate that grants / scholarships have a positive a.s.sociation with learning while loans have no relationship. Figure 4.6 reports the predicted 2007 CLA scores for hypothetical students covering between 0 and 100 percent of their college costs with grants / scholarships or loans. These predictions are adjusted for 2005 CLA scores as well as a range of individual characteristics and inst.i.tutions attended. Students with higher proportions of college costs covered with grants / scholarships have higher predicted 2007 CLA scores. Comparing students at the extreme, a student who covered all of his or her college costs with grants / scholarships would score 45 points higher on the 2007 CLA than a student who received no grants or scholarships. There is no relationship between the proportion of college costs covered with loans and CLA performance. While the gray bars in figure 4.6 slope slightly downward, this trend is relatively weak (approximately half the size of the trend for grants / scholarships) and not statistically significant.

One way in which different sources of funding could be related to student outcomes is through their relationship to other activities, particularly work. Financial aid packages are often constructed to include employment components, whether through the federal work-study program or various inst.i.tutional programs. Students who request and are eligible for financial a.s.sistance may thus have specific employment obligations included in their financial aid packages. Moreover, since financial aid rarely meets the full cost of attending college, students may seek to work additional hours to cover the difference. College students may also work in order to avoid borrowing. Our a.n.a.lyses reveal that sources of funding are indeed related to hours worked on and off campus. The higher the proportion of college costs covered through grants / scholarships, the more time students spend working on campus and the less time they spend working off campus. In contrast, the higher the proportion of college costs covered through loans, the more time students spend working off campus. Financing college education through loans is positively related to working on campus as well, but that relationship is weaker than the relationship between grants / scholarships and working on campus.50 Relationships between studentsa estimates of college funding sources and hours worked, however, are relatively weak in our sample. Moreover, different forms of employment and different college funding strategies are related to studentsa social background and academic preparation. When we include on-and off-campus employment in the a.n.a.lysis in addition to other individual-level characteristics, the relationship between grants / scholarships and CLA growth on the one hand and loans and CLA growth on the other does not change notably (see table A4.4 in methodological appendix). In the final a.n.a.lysis, after statistically adjusting estimates for individual characteristics and inst.i.tutions attended, employment during college does not appear to be related to CLA growth. The percentage of college costs covered through grants / scholarships, however, continues to have a positive a.s.sociation with studentsa learning. While not definitive, these findings point to an area deserving further investigation. Previous research has focused on examining the relationship between financial aid and persistence / attainment; our a.n.a.lyses suggest that learning is another outcome worthy of examination.

Gaps in CLA Growth between African-American and White Students Having shown that specific student experiences facilitate learning in higher education, we return to the concern regarding differences in CLA growth between African-American and white students. In chapter 2, we carefully examined differences in learning gains across different groups of students, focusing in particular on students from different family backgrounds and racial / ethnic groups. Results showed that differences in the social contexts in which students grew up and their academic preparation explained the gaps in CLA growth between students from more and less educated families. However, those factors were not adequate to account for the gap in learning between African-American and white students. Although African-American students on average were more likely to attend schools that had 70 percent or more minority students, took fewer advanced placement courses, and performed less well on college admission tests, these differences only partially explained their lower rate of progress on skills measured by the CLA during the first two years of college. If factors prior to college entry could not explain the gap, could experiences during college provide some insights into the differential growth rates between these two groups?

The first bar in figure 4.7 reports the gap in 2007 CLA scores between African-American and white students, statistically adjusted for studentsa sociodemographic and high school characteristics, academic preparation, and skills at entry into higher education (i.e., 2005 CLA scores). Even after these adjustments, African-American students scored 47 points lower on the CLA at the end of their soph.o.m.ore year than did white students. Next, we include studentsa college experiences in a.n.a.lysis, which slightly increases the gap in learning between African-American and white students. This pattern emerges through a complex combination of differential experiences. The primary factors driving the increase in the gap between African-American and white students are hours spent in fraternities, percent of college cost covered by grants and scholarships, and college major. These are areas in which African-American students have more positive educational experiencesa"that is, experiences more conducive to learning. They spent fewer hours on average in fraternities and sororities, had a higher proportion of their college costs covered by grants and scholarships, and were more likely to major in some fields with higher growth in learning (such as health). These positive experiences are partly countered by exposure to contexts less conducive to learning. For example, African-American students reported lower faculty expectations and demandsa"less than a third of African-American students had taken cla.s.ses that required them to both read more than forty pages a week and write more than twenty pages over the course of a semester. These negative experiences do not entirely offset the positive ones, thus leading to the increase in the CLA gap between African-American and white students after including college experiences in the a.n.a.lysis.

Considering inst.i.tutions attended reveals a different pattern. As reported in chapter 2, African-American students are less likely than their white peers to attend highly selective or selective inst.i.tutions. Colleges attended by African-American and white students may also differ on other inst.i.tutional characteristics. After controlling (i.e., statistically adjusting estimates) for inst.i.tutions attended, the gap in learning between African-American and white students decreases by 15 percent. While this reduction may not appear substantial, it is remarkable given that our a.n.a.lyses already control for a host of individual characteristics and college experiences. African-American students are thus disadvantaged by attending colleges and universities that are less effective at facilitating studentsa development of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. These findings highlight once again the importance of college experiences as well as inst.i.tutions attended, not only for overall learning but also for inequality in learning between African-American and white students.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, after we adjust the CLA performance for a range of individual attributes, college experiences, and inst.i.tutions attended, we could explain almost two-thirds of the gap in learning between African-American and white students. Although this is a notable feat, the gap between the two groups remains sizable and statistically significant. Moreover, although some recent studies have suggested acompensatory effectsa of college experiences, indicating that students who enter college less advantaged gain more from positive experiences, we find no such evidence regarding growth in the CLA for African-American versus white students.51 Persistent gaps in test performance between African-American and white students have been reported at other grade levels as wella"no matter what controls are included in statistical a.n.a.lyses, the gaps persist. This pattern has led some authors to consider the role of more subtle cultural factors in producing the gaps in academic achievement between African-American and white students. 52 A prominent early theory argued that due to the long history of discrimination and inequality, African-Americans have developed an oppositional culture, which defines behaviors and traits appropriate for the group in opposition to the dominant white culture. In the context of schooling, the argument goes, the oppositional culture of African-American adolescents has led them to eschew academic achievement. Strong peer pressures and accusations of aacting whitea are argued to be keeping African-American students from doing well academically.53 The empirical evidence for this theory is weak, and recent decades have presented multiple challenges to the oppositional culture argument.54 However, this does not necessarily mean that culture is inconsequential for educational success. Instead of thinking about it as shaping preferences, we may want to think about culture as a atool kita of habits, skills, and styles.55 Since African-American and white students grow up in different contexts, sociologist Douglas Downey has argued that athe skills, habits, and styles blacks are exposed to are, on average, less useful for academic success.a From this definition of culture, the key to understanding academic performance does not lie with African-American att.i.tudes about schooling but with the social isolation of African-American adolescents.56 An alternative explanation for the differences in academic achievement between African-American and white students that has received increasing support in recent decades is termed astereotype threat.a Emanating from the work of psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, this argument proposes that African-American adolescents are well aware of the negative stereotypes regarding their groupsa academic achievement. Whenever they are called on to perform academically, they face astereotype threata or the fear of confirming the negative stereotype. This fear leads to their lower performance.57 Even subtle cues like being asked to identify oneas race before a GRE-like verbal test can lead African-American students to perform less well.58 Recent a.n.a.lyses of college students at selective inst.i.tutions have supported this argument. The researchers found that stereotype threat is related to studentsa grade-point average, and that controlling for it helps to reduce the gap in academic performance between African-American and white students.59 Although we cannot test these propositions given our data, more subtle mechanisms, resting on differences in acultural tool kitsa and / or the threats of confirming negative stereotypes, deserve further study to advance our understanding of the inequality in academic achievement.

Variation Across and Within Inst.i.tutions.

While students do not learn much on average, this chapter has illuminated how specific activities and experiences during college can either facilitate or thwart learning, creating variation among students and inst.i.tutions. Twenty-nine percent of variance in 2007 CLA scores is found across inst.i.tutions. Even if we focus specifically on growth (estimating 2007 CLA scores while controlling for the 2005 scores), 20 percent of the variance is found across inst.i.tutions. Some of it is a.s.sociated with the sorting of students into inst.i.tutions (i.e., inst.i.tutions enroll students with different characteristics, such as different levels of academic preparation). However, even if we control for a range of background characteristics, including race / ethnicity, socioeconomic background, academic preparation, and 2005 CLA scores, students in some inst.i.tutions experience larger gains on average than others. The same finding has been reported in previous research with respect to other outcomes. For example, while student characteristics and school resources are important predictors of degree attainment, there are notable differences in graduation rates across inst.i.tutions, even after accounting for many of these ainputa characteristics.60 If we select top-performing inst.i.tutionsa"inst.i.tutions that show much larger gains on the CLA than others, net of individual characteristicsa" we find, not surprisingly, that their students report higher incidence of behaviors that are beneficial for learning (figure 4.8).61 Students at these inst.i.tutions report greater course requirements: almost two-thirds (62 percent) of their students reported taking courses that required both reading more than forty pages a week and writing more than twenty pages over the course of a semester. The average for other inst.i.tutions is just over one-third (39 percent). In a finding perhaps related to higher coursework demands, students at high-performing inst.i.tutions also spent more time studying, particularly alonea"almost three more hours of solitary study than students at other inst.i.tutions. Three hours is a remarkable difference, considering that students overall on average spent less than nine hours studying alone. Since we have only 24 inst.i.tutions in the sample, some of which have relatively small sample sizes, we are not able to delve deeply into inst.i.tutional differences. However, even this brief discussion indicates that inst.i.tutions differ in the extent to which they create contexts which facilitate positive behaviors and actions a.s.sociated with learning.

Previous studies of inst.i.tutional characteristics and practices substantiate these findings by showing that inst.i.tutions vary notably in how they structure student experiences. George Kuh and his colleagues, for example, conducted in-depth studies of twenty four-year colleges and universities that had higher than predicted graduation rates and higher than predicted levels of student engagement (based on the National Survey of Student Engagement). Among other characteristics, these inst.i.tutions had an aunshakeable focus on student learning.a Their emphasis on undergraduate learning was manifested in a range of practices, from inst.i.tutional openness to new and experimental instructional techniques to faculty investing more time in students and taking greater responsibility for them, as well as showing greater commitment to both providing and receiving feedback.62 Moreover, although many existing college programs focus exclusively on retention, some have potential to facilitate learning. Learning communitiesa"programs that enroll groups of students in a common set of courses and are frequently linked with residence life experiencesa"have shown positive a.s.sociation with a range of student outcomes including persistence, grades, and self-reported learning.63 Researchers have yet to evaluate the effects of learning communities on standardized objective measures of learninga"this is an important area of future research, as these programs are poised to facilitate persistence as well as learning.

While there is variation in student performance across colleges and universities, it is important to note that there is even more variation within inst.i.tutions. This is the case for most educational outcomes, and it has been extensively doc.u.mented with respect to student engagement in higher education.64 High-as well as low-performing students are found at all inst.i.tutions. If, for example, we consider students in the top 10 percent of the CLA growth distribution, we would find them at each of the inst.i.tutions.65 This is remarkable, given that these students are experiencing more than 1.5 standard deviation of growth between the beginning of their freshman and end of their soph.o.m.ore year, which is more than eight times the average growth. Exploring variation within inst.i.tutions highlights the often ignored and untapped potential for improvement. Even at the highest performing schools there is room for growth, as not all students are performing equally well. And even colleges that are struggling have students who spend time studying and make notable progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills during their first two years. Given our sample-size limitations, we cannot provide a detailed account of what students at each inst.i.tution look like and what inst.i.tutions are doing to facilitate their learning. However, each inst.i.tution can look within, as opposed to only looking across, to learn what works and what does not. High-performing students within inst.i.tutions can serve as guides for thinking about and implementing meaningful change.

Focusing on Learning in Higher Education.

Learning is a complex processa"and thus, not surprisingly, myriad factors shape what and how much students learn in higher education. To make matters more challenging, many of these factors are related, such that studentsa backgrounds and academic preparation are related to the inst.i.tutions they attend and their specific experiences within those inst.i.tutions. We have aimed to untangle these different influences to the extent possible with our observational data, and to provide some insights into which factors may lead to greater growth in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing during the first two years in college.

Putting it all together, we present results from the final model (see table A4.5 in methodological appendix), which includes all relevant factors discussed throughout the chapter. The final model includes only college experiences that were deemed influential in preceding a.n.a.lyses. The overall framework representing this final a.n.a.lysis is ill.u.s.trated in figure 4.9. What students bring to college matters; this is particularly the case with respect to their academic preparation. However, our primary focus in this chapter has been on what students do while they are in college, as those a.n.a.lyses help us illuminate the direction for improving higher-education policy and practice in the future. These final a.n.a.lyses confirm the results discussed in the preceding pages, reaffirming the importance of studentsa college experiences and inst.i.tutions attended for their intellectual development.

What students do in higher education matters. But what faculty members do matters too. Faculty are most directly involved in shaping student experiences, although the support and incentives advocated by their deans, provosts, and presidents will influence whether and how they engage in activities that facilitate student learning. There are some clear examples of how faculty members may shape student actions and, by extension, their learning. For example, college GPA is positively related to the 2007 CLA scores.66 This indicates that faculty members indeed reward critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the cla.s.sroom. The relationship is not perfect but that is to be expected, as not all cla.s.ses are likely to focus on the skills captured by the CLA. Nevertheless, this positive a.s.sociation indicates a potential for considering how those skills, which on surveys faculty report should be crucial components of undergraduate education, can be taught and rewarded in college cla.s.srooms across the nation.

Moreover, as we have seen, when faculty have high expectations and expect students to read and write reasonable amounts, students learn more. In addition, when students report that they have taken a cla.s.s in which they had to read more than forty pages a week and write more than twenty pages over the course of a semester, they also report spending more time studying: more than two additional hours per week than students who do not have to meet such requirements.67 Thus, requiring that students attend to their cla.s.s work has the potential to shape their actions in ways that are conducive to their intellectual development.

While we have reported relationships between specific college experiences and learning, one may still wonder how much those factors really matter. One way to address this question is to evaluate the magnitude of the relationships, which we have aimed to do by presenting predicted CLA scores across different dimensions of college experiences. Another approach is to consider the proportion of variance in the CLA scores that is explained by a different set of factors. The final a.n.a.lysisa"which includes all background measures, college experiences, and inst.i.tutions attendeda" explains 42 percent of the variation in CLA scores. This is a substantial amount by social science standards, although it does imply that much more research is needed to understand the remaining variance. Within our a.n.a.lyses, college experiences and inst.i.tutions attended explained an additional 6 percent of the variance, after controlling for academic preparation and other individual characteristics.68 While that may appear to be a small contribution, academic preparation, which has received much attention in research and policy circles, explains only an additional 8 percent of the variance beyond studentsa background characteristics.69 These estimates may seem low, but this is because of our a.n.a.lytic strategy: we are focusing on growth and are thus controlling for 2005 CLA scores, which, as would be expected, explain the largest portion of the variance in 2007 CLA performance. Thus, studentsa college experiences and inst.i.tutions attended make almost as much of a difference as prior academic preparation. If the blame for low levels of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills of college students is to be placed on academic preparation, then almost an equal amount of responsibility rests with what happens after students enter higher education.

The a.n.a.lyses presented in this chapter illuminate the multiple actors contributing to the current state of limited learning on college campuses. Faculty members are perhaps the easiest to blame, as in some inst.i.tutional settings they are often tempted to focus greater attention on research and other professional demands than on teaching; this reality presents a concrete set of practices that can be critiqued. And many higher-education inst.i.tutions indeed deserve criticism for failing to focus adequately on the core mission of higher education: educating the next generation. Beyond faculty offices and tenure review procedures, however, there are students, who spend far more time socializing than studying.70 Given the little time they spend studying, it is no surprise that they are not learning much on average. This is partly a consequence of lax demands and expectations, but it is wishful thinking to imagine that simply increasing faculty demands will produce greater learning. aCurrent cultural norms among U.S. undergraduates support a conception of schooling as an important, but part-time activity. Other parts of life, notably, social and leisure activities, are at least as important,a sociologist Steven Brint recently observed.71 Judging from studentsa use of time, we find that these social and leisure activities appear much more important than academic pursuits. The college experience is perceived by many students to be, at its core, a social experience.72 The collegiate culture emphasizes sociability and encourages students to have funa"to do all the things they have not had a chance to do before, or may not have a chance to do after they enter athe real worlda of the labor market. Faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents are all implicated to a certain extent in accepting or at least partly acquiescing to contemporary collegiate culture.

A Mandate for Reform.

aWith regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,a Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. aWe ask, aHow high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?a With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, aIs it safe to eat here?aa1 Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in CLA performance during the first two years of college. While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general a.n.a.lytical competencies a.s.sessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely a.s.sumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.

While higher education is expected to accomplish many tasksa"and contemporary colleges and universities have indeed contributed to society in ways as diverse as producing pharmaceutical patents as well as primetime athletic bowlsa"existing organizational cultures and practices too often do not prioritize undergraduate learning. Faculty and administrators, working to meet multiple and at times competing demands, too rarely focus on either improving instruction or demonstrating gains in student learning. More troubling still, the limited learning we have observed in terms of the absence of growth in CLA performance is largely consistent with the accounts of many students, who report that they spend increasing numbers of hours on nonacademic activities, including working, rather than on studying. They enroll in courses that do not require substantial reading or writing a.s.signments; they interact with their professors outside of cla.s.srooms rarely, if ever; and they define and understand their college experiences as being focused more on social than on academic development. Moreover, we find that learning in higher education is characterized by persistent and / or growing inequality. There are significant differences in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills when comparing groups of students from different family backgrounds and racial / ethnic groups. More important, not only do students enter college with unequal demonstrated abilities, but their inequalities tend to persista"or, in the case of African-American students relative to white students, increasea"while they are enrolled in higher education.

Despite the low average levels of learning and persistent inequality, we have also observed notable variation in student experiences and outcomes both across and within inst.i.tutions. While the average level of performance indicates that students in general are often embedded in higher-education inst.i.tutions where only very modest academic demands are placed on them, exceptional students, who have demonstrated impressive growth over time on CLA performance, exist in all the settings we examined. In addition, students attending certain high-performing inst.i.tutions had more beneficial college experiences in terms of experiencing rigorous reading / writing requirements and spending greater numbers of hours studying. Students attending these inst.i.tutions demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students enrolled elsewhere.

The Implications of Limited Learning.

Notwithstanding the variation and positive experiences in certain contexts, the prevalence of limited learning on todayas college campuses is troubling indeed. While historian Helen Horowitzas work reminds us that the phenomenon of limited learning in higher education has a long and venerable tradition in this countrya"in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, acollege discipline conflicted with the genteel upbringing of the elite sons of Southern gentry and Northern merchantsaa"this outcome today occurs in a fundamentally different context.2 Contemporary college graduates generally do not leave school with the a.s.sumption that they will ultimately inherit the plantations or businesses of their fathers. Occupational destinations in modern economies are increasingly dependent on an individualas academic achievements. The attainment of long-term occupational success in the economy requires not only academic credentials, but likely also academic skills. As report after national blue-ribbon report has reminded us, todayas jobs require aknowledge, learning, information, and skilled-intelligence.a3 These are cognitive abilities that, unlike Herrnstein and Murrayas immutable IQ construct, can be learned and developed at school.4 Something else has also changed. After World War II, the United States dramatically expanded its higher-education system and led the world for decades in the percentage of young people it graduated from college, often by a wide margin. Over the past two decades, while the U.S. higher education system has grown only marginally, the rest of the world has not been standing still. As Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Higher Education and Public Policy, has observed: aIn the 1990s, however, as the importance of a college-educated workforce in a global economy became clear, other nations began making the kinds of dramatic gains that had characterized American higher education earlier. In contrast, by the early 1990s, the progress the United States had made in increasing college partic.i.p.ation had come to a virtual halt. For most of the 1990s, the United States ranked last among 14 nations in raising college partic.i.p.ation rates, with almost no increase during the decade.a5 For the first time in recent history, many countries today graduate higher percentages of their youth from college than does the United States. While the United States still ranks second of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of adult workersa bachelor-level degree attainment, it has dropped to sixth when higher-education attainment of only the most recent cohort of young adults is considered.6 aWe may still have more than our share of the worldas best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,a the recent federal report A Test of Leadership observed. aWorse, they are pa.s.sing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.a7 The U.S. higher-education system has in recent years arguably been living off its reputation as being the best in the world. The findings in our study, however, should remind us that the systemas international reputationa"largely derived from graduate programs at a handful of elite public and private universitiesa"serves as no guarantee that undergraduate students are being appropriately challenged or exposed to educational experiences that will lead to academic growth throughout the wide range of diverse U.S. colleges and universities. While the U.S. higher-education system still enjoys the compet.i.tive advantage of a sterling international reputation, in recent decades it has been increasingly surpa.s.sed in terms of quant.i.ty (i.e., the percentage of young adults it graduates), and its quality is coming under increasing scrutiny. The U.S. governmentas recent decision to partic.i.p.ate in current international efforts led by the OECD to measure higher-education academic performance on a comparative basis cross-nationally, following the less-than-stellar comparative results observed in international comparisons of adult literacy, provides little rea.s.surance that the systemas reputation will not become increasingly challenged and debated.8 In an increasingly globalized and compet.i.tive world system, the quality and quant.i.ty of outcomes of a countryas education system are arguably related to a nationas future trajectory and international economic position.9 The changing economic and global context facing contemporary college graduates convinces us that the limited learning that exists on U.S. campusesa"even if it has been a part of the higher-education landscape since the systemas inceptiona"qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be a subject of concern of policymakers, pract.i.tioners, parents, and citizens alike. While the phenomenon can accurately be described as a social problem, the situation that exists on todayas college campuses in no way qualifies as a crisis, and we have consciously avoided the use of rhetoric here that would point to aa crisis in higher education.a Limited learning in the U.S. higher education system cannot be defined as a crisis because inst.i.tutional and system-level organizational survival is not being threatened in any significant way. Parentsa"although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costsa"want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain credentials that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external inst.i.tutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. In short, the system works. No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduate student academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence. Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis because the inst.i.tutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek, and therefore neither the inst.i.tutions themselves nor the system as a whole is in any way challenged or threatened.

While in the long term this countryas global compet.i.tiveness is likely weakened by a white-collar workforce that is not uniformly trained at a rigorous level, colleges where limited academic learning occurs in the short term can still fulfill their primary social functions: students are allocated to occupational positions based on their credentials, not their skills; students are provided settings where they can experiment with new forms of social behavior and develop independent ident.i.ties; and, as we have shown elsewhere, studentsa subsequent marital choices can in part be structured by their college pedigrees.10 This evaluation can be contrasted with the situation that exists in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, where a acrisis in moral authoritya has prevented many public schools from socializing youth effectively and has aundermined public school legitimacy, eroded popular support necessary for maintenance and expansion of these inst.i.tutions, stimulated political challenges and the growth of compet.i.tive organizations, and thus [has] come to threaten public school organizational survival in many state and local settings.a11 Socialization of elementary and secondary school students is a core inst.i.tutional function, but academic learning at colleges unfortunately has not been recognized as such.

Transforming Higher Education.

Given that the problem of limited learning in higher education has such a diverse set of causes, potential efforts towards educational reform must be multifaceted, and must be directed at various levels for significant change to occur. Specifically, we propose here recommendations for improved educational practices at the inst.i.tutional level as well as policy changes that are focused at the system level. Before discussing these potential reforms, we briefly discuss the need for improved elementary- and secondary-school student preparation. While the latter issue is largely beyond the scope of this book, we would be remiss not to identify and bring attention to the topic here.

Student preparation.

Our study provides evidence supporting the proposition that students who come into college with higher levels of academic preparation (in terms of either prior advanced placement coursework or SAT / ACT performance) are better positioned to learn more while in college. These findings resonate with prior research that has emphasized the importance of rigorous academic work in high school. Clifford Adelman, for example, has demonstrated that athe intensity and quality of oneas secondary school curriculum was the strongest influence not merely on college entrance, but more importantly, on bacheloras degree completion for students who attended a four-year college.a12 Many students come into college with such inadequate levels of preparation that they must spend much of their early coursework in remedial education cla.s.ses where gains in higher-order critical thinking and complex reasoning are unlikely to occur. One-third of recent four-year college students took at least one remedial course in college.13 In terms of needed reforms in elementary and secondary schools, however, we believe that improving academic preparation is only half the story. Many students emerging from these schools have also not developed norms, values, and behaviors conducive to a.s.suming productive lives as responsible adults, let alone the ability and interest to focus on academic learning at college.14 While students today express very high educational expectations and professional ambitions, as Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have well doc.u.mented, they have failed to develop realistic understandings of the steps necessary to achieve their goals.15 These students have not formulated what the social psychologist William Damon calls apaths to purposeaa"that is, moral grounding that anchors their ambitions in the tasks, behaviors, and practices required to achieve the ends they view as meaningful. Youth today have been unable to develop a sense of purpose in their lives not only because of general changes in parenting and the larger culture, Damon argues, but because schools have turned away from accepting responsibility for youth socialization and moral education. Elementary and secondary educational reform has focused almost exclusively on improving studentsa standardized test scores. aOften squeezed entirely out of the school day are questions of meaning and purpose that should underlie every academic exercise,a Damon notes. aOur obsessive reliance on standardized test scores deters both teachers and students from concentrating on the real mission of schooling: developing a love of learning for learningas sakea"a love that will then lead to self-maintained learning throughout the lifespan.a16 Higher education leadership.

aUltimately, itas about the culture aa was a conclusion drawn by researchers studying twenty high-performing four-year inst.i.tutions.17 Inst.i.tutions need to develop a culture of learning if undergraduate education is to be improved. This is not an easy or an overnight process, but one that requires strong leadershipa"including presidents, deans, provosts, and others demonstrating a commitment to these goals. aStudent success becomes an inst.i.tutional priority when leaders make it so.a18 Setting student success, and learning in particular, as a priority provides guidance and focus for future action; staying the course over the long haul is crucial, as many aspects of an inst.i.tution may need changing, implementing the change takes time, and seeing the results of specific policies and practices takes even longer. Leaders at successful inst.i.tutions have a strong sense of purpose; they engage other members of the community in achieving the vision, and they make decisions about hiring and programs that support the achievement of these goals. Effective administrators provide the vision; motivate broad engagement and openness to change, continuous evaluation, and growth; and aget and keep the right peopleaa"those committed to undergraduate learning.19 We believe that one way for higher-education leaders to communicate a greater sense of inst.i.tutional purpose is for them to articulate to their respective communities that colleges and universities need to take greater responsibility for shaping the developmental trajectories of students, and to prioritize these organizational goals in decision-making. It is not enough for higher-education inst.i.tutions simply to confer educational degrees on students, if the credentials do not reflect substantive academic accomplishments and if the students have not developed an appreciation of the meaning and responsibilities a.s.sociated with their acquisition. Many higher-education administrators and faculty today have largely turned away from earlier conceptions of their roles that recognized that providing support for student academic and social development was a moral imperative worth sacrificing for personally, professionally, and inst.i.tutionally.

Consider, for example, the issue of college dormitories. College dormitories were originally developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, according to historian Julie Reuben, because auniversity administrators recognized that it was almost impossible to mold the social lives of students when they lived outside the college.a20 Lyman Wilbur, Stanford Universityas president at the time, wrote that awhen students are housed together there is developed a strong cooperative sense of loyalty and enthusiasm called acollege spirita which has a profound effect upon the development of the character of the students and upon the welfare of the inst.i.tution.a At Harvard University a similar sentiment was expressed. aThe problem of the college,a Harvardas president A. Lawrence Lowell a.s.serted, ais a moral one, deepening the desire to develop oneas mind, body, and character; and this is much promoted by living in surroundings and an atmosphere congenial to the object.a For Lowell and other university leaders at the time, the dormitory was a asocial device for a moral purpose.a21 Today, rather than instruments designed for shaping studentsa individual social and academic development at college, residence halls are often viewed as arevenue and cost centersa that need to be managed primarily for financial ends. Many colleges and universities today are building private-suite residence halls to cater to student demands for increased privacy and comfort. At the Midwestern public university where sociologist Mary Grigsby studied, four new dorms that together can house five thousand students have been built featuring atwo-bedroom suites with a shared bathroom and single rooms with private baths.a Grigsby notes that acompet.i.tion for students by universities and perceptions on the part of decision makers that parent and student consumers want upscale facilities, along with beautiful grounds, up-to date recreation centers, and glamorous sports stadiums, have led Midwest to invest heavily in such construction.a Grigsbyas study of undergraduate culture, however, reveals that while these new forms of private residences are popular among student and parent consumers, they have significantly altered the collegiate atmosphere. In traditional shared-room dormitories with communal bathrooms, Grigsby found open doors and very high levels of interpersonal interaction; in the new private-suite residences doors were closed, little interpersonal interaction occurred, and the atmosphere was similar to that of modern apartment buildings. In terms of the role of adult authority in these two settings, Grigsby notes the comments of a resident a.s.sistant who had served in both traditional shared-room and new private-suite halls: aWhere students in the other dorms (with shared rooms and communal baths) resented my enforcing rules because they said I was ajust one of them,a in this [private-suite] dorm they complain because Iam just athe hired helpa and have no right to tell them what to do, since they are paying for their privacy and have a right to do what they want in their rooms.a22 In their efforts to cater to student consumers, colleges and universities have arguably moved even further away from their responsibility to structure social behavior and provide a setting conducive to rigorous academic instruction and moral development. While these new dormitories potentially provide increased opportunities for students to study alone, the ability to develop a shared sense of mission and collegiate ident.i.ty is losta"as, too, is the possibility to tie these larger communal sentiments to the development of individual purpose and meaning in the lives of undergraduate students.

Improving curriculum and instruction.

While it would be nave to base policy reform on appeals for higher education actors to embrace a call for inst.i.tutional renewal on moral terms, all higher-education inst.i.tutions could focus increased attention on the academic component of undergraduate learning without fundamental challenges to the existing system. Our findings provide clear empirical evidence that academically rigorous instruction is a.s.sociated with improved performance on tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication. Spending time studying, having faculty who hold high expectations, and offering courses that require reasonable amounts of reading and writing are a.s.sociated with studentsa learning during the first two years of college. These practices focus attention on the fact that students benefit when they are in instructional settings where faculty demand and students engage in rigorous academic endeavors. Prior sociological literature has at times applied the term aacademic pressa to elementary and secondary schools whose organizational climates encourage student academic engagement and effort.23 Given the large number of students who were not exposed to courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week and more than twenty pages of writing over the course of the semester, we believe that it is inc.u.mbent on higher-education inst.i.tutions to take seriously their responsibility to monitor and enhance the academic requirements of courses. While at most colleges and universities course syllabi are collected from instructors and administratively filed (typically at the department level), there is often little evidence that faculty have come together to ensure that coursework is appropriately demanding and requires significant reading, writing, and critical thinking. Faculty share a collective responsibility to address this issue.

In addition to reading and writing requirements a.s.sociated with coursework, we have found that students who report that faculty have high expectations of their performance demonstrate improved rates of undergraduate learning. Just as they need to ensure rigorous a.s.signments a.s.sociated with coursework, colleges also need to encourage faculty to communicate high expectations to all their students. At least since the publication of Pygmalion in the Cla.s.sroom in 1968, elementary and secondary school teachers have understood the importance of high expectations for all students, and have been inst.i.tutionally encouraged to demonstrate them.24 Unlike elementary and secondary school teachers, however, college professors have typically not received formal training in instruction that has emphasized the pedagogical functions of educational expectations. Our findings suggest that high expectations for students and increased academic requirements in syllabi, if coupled with rigorous grading standards that encourage students to spend more time studying, might potentially yield significant payoffs in terms of undergraduate learning outcomes.

Academic press is one element of effective instructional practices that has been advocated by higher education reformers in recent decades. The importance of active learning and related academic experiences has been repeatedly emphasized in scholarship on effective practices in higher education. In their seminal work t.i.tled Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education, for example, Chickering and Gamson outlined seven categories of effective educational practices, including those that encourage the following activities: student-faculty contact, co-operation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, and respect for diverse talents and ways of learning. These principles are reflected in the five benchmarks of academic engagement of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).25 Based on Chickering and Gamsonas work as well as other research on effective practices in higher education, Kuh and his colleagues have identified five cl.u.s.ters of desirable educational practices: academic challenge, active / collaborative learning, studenta"faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environments.26 Of the five categories of effective practice, the academic challenge benchmark is most clearly a.s.sociated with the sociological concept of aacademic pressa and corresponds with key factors identified as facilitating student learning in our study. In the NSSE framework, academic challenge includes questions regarding time spent preparing for cla.s.s, course demands (including reading, writing, using higher-order thinking skills, and working harder than students thought they could to meet the standards), and inst.i.tutional emphasis on studying and academic work. The results from NSSE indicate that academic challenge has a strong relationship with student persistence and grades.27 Results from the ongoing Wabash National Study, which uses slightly different measures of engagement, indicate that academic challenge and effective teachinga"including factors such as prompt feedback and faculty interest in teaching and student developmenta"are related to most of the twenty-nine indicators of student development in college, from moral reasoning and psychological wellbeing to academic motivation and critical thinking.28 While what faculty members do matters, how much time and effort students invest in their cla.s.ses is paramount: Studying is crucial for strong academic performance as anothing subst.i.tutes for time on task.a29 It is worth emphasizing that faculty demands and studentsa time on task are related: when the students in our study reported that they had taken a cla.s.s where they had to read more than forty pages a week and a cla.s.s where they had to write more than twenty pages during the semester, they also reported spending more time studying.

At the core, changing higher education to focus on learning will require transforming studentsa curricular experiencesa"not only the time they spend sitting in their chairs during a given cla.s.s period, but everything a.s.sociated with coursework, from faculty expectations and approaches to teaching to course requirements and feedback. Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning.30 Once student learning is the focus of the enterprise, faculty can attend to the strategies that improve it. Research by members of Harvard Project Zero, for example, provides ample clues about strategies that facilitate student learning, including clearly stating course objectives, clearly presenting material, linking course content to course objectives, providing students with examples of what is expected, creating ample opportunities for students to apply what they have learned and perform their knowledge publicly, and a.s.sessing learning frequently and adjusting teaching accordingly. Education is not a process of simply acc.u.mulating afacts, concepts and skills,a but one that facilitates studentsa aever-increasing grasp of the world.a31 Scholarship on effective college teaching and learning in recent decades has emphasized student engagement and has focused on active and collaborative curricular activities. Although there are different definitions and emphases, at the core of active / collaborative learning is the idea that students should not pa.s.sively absorb the information but instead should engage in the learning process, often through applying what they have learned and working with others. The NSSE benchmark for active / collaborative learning, for example, includes factors such as asking questions in cla.s.s, making cla.s.s presentations, working with cla.s.smates during and / or outside of cla.s.s, tutoring or teaching students, partic.i.p.ating in community-based projects, and discussing ideas from cla.s.s / readings with others. Based on these measures, college students appear to be quite engaged in their learning: virtually all contribute to cla.s.s discussion, and the vast majority have made cla.s.s presentations and worked with peers inside and outside of the cla.s.sroom.32 Although preference for active engagement in the learning process over pa.s.sive acquisition of information can hardly be disputed, there is a question of what aactive / collaborative learninga really entails in the day-to-day activities of a cla.s.sroom. Has adopting active / collaborative learning meant mostly that we have made cla.s.srooms more lively and interesting, but not more demanding and challenging? Sociologist Steven Brint has recently raised concerns about the overarching emphasis on student engagement in higher education, which he describes as anew progressivism.a According to Brint, the new progressivism aadvocated active learning experiences, commitment to diversity and civic engagement, and challenging academic standards. However, [this] advocacy of challenging academic standards proved to be no match for the consumerism and utilitarianism of college student life. The trajectory of the new progressivism consequently mirrored the pattern of Ka"12 progressive education in the early 20th century, when followers of John Dewey, such as William Heard Kilpatrick, de-emphasized Deweyas insistence on rigor and frequent a.s.sessment and highlighted student-centered, active learning, and community engagement themes.a33 Indeed, while approximately 90 percent of college seniors say they have worked on projects and a.s.signments with cla.s.smates inside and outside of the cla.s.sroom, 50 percent have not written a twenty-page paper, only one-third have taken coursework that avery mucha emphasized synthesizing and organizing ideas, only approximately 40 percent have taken coursework that avery mucha focused on applying or a.n.a.lyzing theories or concepts, and the vast majority spent less than fifteen hours a week studying.34 Given these trends, perhaps it is not surprising that NSSE measures of engagement do not track strongly or consistently with objective measures of learning.35 Our own findings also caution specifically against an overemphasis on studying with peers.

Engaging activities and peer collaboration do not have to be ant.i.thetical to learning, but they are likely conducive only in specifically structured contexts that focus studentsa attention appropriately on learning. In a recent national survey, only approximately 50 percent of students reported that they were avery successfula at developing effective study skills in college.36 This raises the question of whether students know how to study, particularly in groups or collaboratively. Active / collaborative learning approaches are expected to increase student engagement and time on task. As Kuh and his colleagues claimed: aActive and collaborative learning is an effective educational practice because students learn more when they are intensely involved in their education and are asked to think about and apply what they are learning in different settings.a37 What we need to delve into more deeply is whether students are indeed using active and collaborative learning activities in these expected ways, and in particular whether these activities lead to notable gains on objective measures of learning. Studies rarely gauge the content, depth, or actual learning that takes place in collaborative experiences, thus leaving open the question of whether in practice those experiences are as beneficial for mastering complex skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing as they should be, based on theories of learning and cognitive development or on studentsa self-reports.

It is not only students who may not put active and collaborative learning activities to best use. Faculty are not very skilled at doing so either. During graduate training, future faculty members receive little if any formal instruction on teaching. Doctoral training focuses primarily, and at times exclusively, on research. Although recent decades have seen a proliferation of interest in improving the preparation of graduate students, a recent survey of doctoral students indicated that only 50 percent either had an opportunity to take a teaching a.s.sistantas training course lasting at least one term, or reported that they had an opportunity to learn about teaching in their respective disciplines through workshops and seminars.38 Not surprisingly, one of the main concerns of students in doctoral programs is a lack of systematic opportunities to help them learn how to teach.39 Graduate students are not only entering cla.s.srooms without much preparation, but more problematically, they are learning in their graduate programs to deprioritize and perhaps even devalue teaching. Frederick, a graduate student in history interviewed in a recent study of graduate school experience by Jody Nyquist and her colleagues, made the following remark about the comments and choices of faculty members in his department: aI have learned that the people who call the shots do not value teaching. And Iave learned that I canat spend as much time on my teaching as I have.a Alice, a graduate student in math, conveyed even stronger sentiments: aWhat kind of messages have I received about being a teacher? That itas really settling for a lesser thing. That if you are going to be a real person, youare going to do research a .a40 This aspect of graduate training, which neither prepares students to teach nor always instills in them a respect for the importance of teaching, is problematic not only on principled grounds but also from a functional standpoint: aMany, if not most [PhDs], will not be tenure-track faculty members,a and only a few will have jobs at research universities.41 A number of organizations and major foundations have spent recent decades conducting studies, sponsoring initiatives, and organizing conferences and roundtables to address the current state of affairs and the future of the doctorate. Some of the programs, such as the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, appear effective at increasing the interest and preparation of graduate students for teaching.42 Those important endeavors are chipping away at the ivory tower. However, transformational chang

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