Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn’t quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree.
Times have changed, he said. “It’s not that college degrees aren’t worthwhile,” but the returns are diminished, he said. “After 2008, “you can’t be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn’t matter how many loans you took out.”
Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don’t seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have.
“They might not hand out A’s on college campuses like they’re candy,” he said, “but we hand out B’s like they are candy. You’ve got to really work today to get something below a B.”
The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. “By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first two years of college, but all four years of college,” he said.
Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, are also following the students through the labor market. Their follow-up with the students from early last year found that 60 percent of the students are carrying considerable college debt, averaging around $27,000. (That does not count credit-card debt, which students often use to cover some college expenses.) Of the students who found jobs, 35 percent of the students made more than $30,000 and 17 percent made more than $40,000.
Nine percent of the surveyed students are unemployed, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—close to the national average. Given that these students are college-educated and relatively cheap to hire, “you would think that would be lower than the national average,” he said. In a statistic that made some in the room shudder, 31 percent were back living with their parents a year after graduation.
In future research, Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa plan to look at whether the graduates’ employment is more strongly associated with their course work and performance in college, or with the credentials of their alma maters and the social networks built in college.
Less for the Less Talented
Mr. Arum said that the researchers’ more recent data also shows a growing performance gap between students of different ethnicities—a gap that is particularly stark when comparing white and black students. “This pattern is just like K-12 education, so we shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “But in K-12 education, there is a national discourse about closing the gap.” Not so much in higher education, he said.
“Faculty are often given another message implicitly: Spend time focusing on the talented,” he said. “Be careful spending time with kids who are struggling—it’s a time suck, it will take away from your research, and it won’t be rewarding.”
In the authors’ continuing research to track civic engagement, Mr. Arum said they found even more disturbing data. One-third of the surveyed students read a newspaper or online news either only monthly or never. Those students who studied the least in college composed the majority of that least-informed third.
“Our democracy literally depends on the educated class in the future understanding the world,” he said. “They didn’t develop complex reasoning skills, so they can’t separate opinion from fact—and they don’t read the newspaper in the first place. ... Our country faces these difficult problems, where even people who do read the newspaper struggle to figure out what needs to be done. This is the finding that keeps me up at night.”
Most recently, Mr. Arum and Mr. Roksa also wanted to find out if students are paying attention to significant books now discussed in the press. And they were particularly worried that students would have read about Academically Adrift—which has been featured in scores of articles, including a recent one in The New Yorker—and that they would recognize their role in the research, which could distort the survey findings in the future.
So they picked three titles and asked students if they had read them or heard about them: One was their own book. Another was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was an object of furor in newspapers and on blogs and talk shows. They picked as a control The College Fear Factor (Harvard University Press, 2009), which had not gotten much attention.
“This is the humbling piece: We came in third,” he said. Less than 3 percent of the students had heard of Academically Adrift, “and none of them realized it was them.”
