Limited Learning on College Campuses

Abstract

Politicians, policymakers, and private foundations have united in recent years around achieving a common goal: college for all. As President Barack Obama pledged in his first speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009: “We will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” At the beginning of the 21st century, increasing and ensuring individual access to college presents itself not just as a moral imperative, but an economic necessity. As employment opportunities in manufacturing continue to grow scarcer in the United States, both individual and national global economic competitiveness requires mastery of what many commentators have termed “21st century skills.” These skills, generally thought uniformly taught at U.S. colleges and universities, are defined as including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication. But what if sending students to college did not necessarily ensure that much was learned once there? What if at the beginning of the 21st century many colleges and universities were not focused primarily on undergraduate learning, but instead had become distracted by other institutional functions and goals? We have systematically investigated the state of undergraduate learning in contemporary colleges and universities. Following more than 3,000 traditional-age students as they enrolled in coursework from Fall 2005 to Spring 2009, across a wide range of 29 four-year colleges and universities, we found a set of conditions suggesting that something indeed is seriously amiss in U.S. higher education. In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), we have described some of these disturbing conditions and documented the extent to which many students show little if any growth over the first 2 years of college in their ability to perform tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). In the report Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project on which this summary is based, we extend those findings to document the rate of growth on the CLA for the full 4 years of college, academic practices associated with improved student performance, as well as differences across individuals and institutions in the level of learning. The 4 year results confirmed the broad patterns and trends based on 2 years of data analysis identified in Academically Adrift.