In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessn... - 0 views
-
George Mehaffy on 13 Jun 11"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