Abstract
Make no mistake about it. In the continuing outpour of books about America's beleaguered higher education industry, the biggest recent bombshell among them all is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa: these two sociology professors published a guest op-ed piece in the May 15, 2011, Sunday New York Times, a full four months after their book was released officially on January 15. And certainly in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in a population that stretches to have a twenty-four-minute attention span, four months is an eternity. Academically Adrift is, without doubt, a withering read, a little death by a thousand cuts, and one that the fairly extensive news media coverage cannot Eind has not done justice to. Thus, one mostly overlooked aspect of the book is that one major (or expected major) that the 2,362 participating students (at twenty-four four-year colleges/universities) could report was communications. (Surveyed students saw it defined as speech, journalism, television/radio, etc.) It was one of several broad categories on a list that included business, education/social work, engineering/computer science, health, social science/humanities, science/mathematics, and (communications omitted here). (That U.S. news media do such a lousy job of covering both their own industry, their own professions, and their own educations is a separate topic that I have addressed previously at length elsewhere.) Arum and Roksa, working with the Council for Aid to Education and the Social Science Research Council, were able to gather demographic data; scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) at the beginning of the freshmen year and spring of the sophomore year; and students' reports related to climate, use, location/context, financing, and academic preparation. Arum and Roksa's data analysis was highly sophisticated, and I could not here adequately summarize their various controls, multiple regressions, etc. (Their appendix of methodology, data tables, and the student questionnaire require sixty-eight pages of their 270-page volume.) So let's cut to the chase. Students (who were broken down into concentrator students and non-concentrator, with concentrators being students who had taken at least one standard deviation above the mean percentage of courses taken in a subject) were asked how many times they met with faculty outside of class during the previous semester. Among concentrators: science/math: 4.03; engineering/computer: 3.74; social sciences/humanities: 3.71; education/social work: 3.35; business: 3.34; communications: 3.2; and health: 2.9. These numbers are not per-course, but overall, so communications students are meeting with professors less than once a month, ranging from the same professor each time and not meeting with other instructors at all, to meeting 3+ instructors only once each during a semester. Arum and Roksa note that the less often students meet outside class with instructors, the more they are potentially at elevated risk of limited achievement and noncompletion (p. 64). Students were asked how many hours a week they spent studying; among concentrating students, it was science/mathematics: 14.7; health: 13.17; engineering/computer: 12.69; social sciences/humanities: 12.44; education/social work: 10.64; communications: 10.51; and business: 9.55. (Disclaimer: not all results were statistical- Iy significant.) As Arum and Roksa comment, ...alarming, 37 percent of students reported spending less than five hours per week preparing for their courses. The limited number of hours students spend studying is consistent with the emergence of a college student culture focused on social life and strategic management of work requirements....Academic 'success' was achieved through 'controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload. …
Published Version
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