Intentionally Adrift: What The Pathways Project Can Teach Us about Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Among the myriad books bemoaning the crisis in higher education published in 2011, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum and Roksa 2011) garnered the most attention both within and outside the academy. While Richard Arum's and Josipa Roksa's research deserves some of the criticism it has received (Brooks 2011), readers keep returning to the book and wondering about the authors' conclusions. There appears amidst the cacophony of praise and blame, a grain of truth: students in general seem not to be learning as deeply and broadly as their predecessors. Arum and Roksa spread the blame around: parents focus on credentials, students focus on social life, faculty focus on research, and administrators focus on rankings and budgets. No one, they claim, is really focused on learning. Students are left without a compass, it seems, academically adrift in a boat without a rudder.