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"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson 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 tw

"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu

"February 20, 2011 A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I By Thomas H. Benton Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years." And that's just the beginning of the bad news. Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address, President Obama included a call for more Americans to go to college in order to make us more competitive in a global context. This is "our generation's Sputnik moment," he said. Many professors will recall that the arms race with the Soviet Union motivated a surge in support for higher education that lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including the arts and humanities. Fifty years later, perhaps the most visible remnant of the original "Sputnik moment" is the belief that everyone should go to college. But that raises the question: What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students? Arum and Roksa point out that students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences-rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields-tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers."

"April 14, 2011 Business Educators Struggle to Put Students to Work By David Glenn Paul M. Mason does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says. Mr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves." A third of the business students at Radford U. don't engage with their coursework, in the estimation of one teaching assistant. "I understand teamwork is important," he says, "but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers." Surveys find that employers want to hire college graduates-business majors or not-who can write coherently, think creatively, and, like these students at the U. of Virginia, analyze quantitative data. Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major."

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

After noting that two major sources of support for postsecondary institutions - state appropriations and university endowments - are down, the report goes on to point out that the demand for public higher education is growing as more people seek skills needed for today's workforce. The report also finds while higher education generally saw declining state support in FY 2009, funds made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allowed certain states to slightly increase spending on higher education in FY 2010. Even with ARRA funds, 23 states spent less on higher education in FY 2010 than FY 2009. State policy developments in response to revenue declines highlighted by NCSL include California's efforts to decrease enrollment, Florida's decision to tighten residency requirements, and the reduction or elimination of programs in North Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah. The report concludes with a table summarizing the significant higher education funding developments in the states over the past two years.

"The current state of student learning in American colleges and universities leaves much to be desired. To be sure, the evidence about whether students are learning is fragmentary, imperfect, and discouraging. Most distressing are the results of the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey and the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which show that average literacy levels among adults with bachelor's degrees have declined over time. That's on top of the fact that the overall level is low: On average, four-year college graduates have only an "intermediate" level of literacy, meaning that they are capable of doing only "moderately challenging literacy activities." Further, data collected from the National Survey of America's College Students-which used the literacy survey-show that "20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees-and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees-have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.""