Book ReviewLowering Higher Education and Academically Adrift Students: Is “College for all” Too High an Ideal?

Gordon (Guoping) Feng, 11/16/2014

Since World War II, access has become so central a theme in American higher education that today it’s taken for granted in American public discourse (Arum & Roksa, 2011, p 65). But along with this massification and universification of college access comes perennial headache of extremely low retention and graduation rates: only 59% 4-year college students graduate within 6 years of study, and less than one third (31%) of 2-year college students finish their study within 3 years (NCES, 2014). Those successful graduates, however, are not highly acknowledged in the labor market. According to one survey, employers say that only 16% of college graduates excel in written communication and 28% in critical thinking/problem solving; in another survey, employers rate only 26% of college graduates as being very well prepared in writing, and 22% as being very well prepared to think critically (Arum & Roksa, p. 143). Canadian universities, seemingly more successful than its American counterparts in bringing out graduates with tertiary degrees (topping the world at 53% for the 25-64 age group, OECD, 2014), has similar problems: one study uses BA-lite to refer to the devalued bachelor degrees (Cote & Allahar, 2011).

Obviously, the quality of college education should be a concern to all those who care about higher education. Nevertheless, since it’s extremely hard to measure learning quality, or the added value in the education process, the answer has been evasive to the question how much students really learn in the college period. Two recent books, however, has caused significant attention to the limited learning on campus, as attested by the number of their being cited, and by our being assigned this book review to critique them.

Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal  Education (Cote & Allahar, 2011) is a sequel to the authors’ Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (Cote & Allahar, 2007), which focuses on college student’s “disengagement” with their study and the underlying causes. The two Canadian sociology professors first examine the broader social contexts pulling liberal education towards vocationalism: massification, corporatization, social engineering, and culture wars,  and then analyse the competing interests of various stake-holders in the general “education forum”: students, professors, secondary-school teachers, policy makers and administrators.  Their focus is then turned to the “disengagement compact” between students on the one hand and professors and administrators on the other. Although a large number of students enter college under or unprepared in terms of both skills and motivation (Cote & Allahar, 2011, p. 81), they still treat their college study as a part-time job: students spend on average only about 13 hours per week preparing for their classes (Cote & Allahar, p. 75), and they are awarded good grades (grade inflation). Of course, college professors have a role in relaxing the rigor leading to this grade inflation, but there are deeper cultural causes. With universities aiming to attract for revenue  less able students who get to think of themselves as entitled consumers, and valuing research more than teaching in order to obtain prestige, professors already working 50-60 hours per week (Cote & Allahar, p. 100) have to succum to pressures from both sides. The authors’ recommendations for a rigorous liberal education are straightforward and idealistic: implement standardized entrance and exit exams to ensure the minimum standard; set the student-teacher ratio to 15:1; to lead people lacking academic potential but possessing other abilities to other tracks.

Cote and Allahar’s primary source of data is from National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which surveys students in the US and Canada about their learning since 2000 (Arum & Roksa, 2011, p. 26) . According to NSSE 2006, the percentage of engaged students in Canada is higher than in the USA, while the percentage of disengaged students is lower, even though the disengagement rate is between two to five times greater than that of engaged students in both countries (Cote & Allahar, p. 135). InAcademically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses, Arum and Roksa presented a quantitative study on the added value of education in American universities. They used Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a state-of-the-art assessment instrument to measure undergraduate learning recently developed by a group of leading psychometricians, and got test results of CLA and survey responses concerning social and educational backgrounds and experiences from  2,322 students in 14 higher education institutions of varying size, selectivity and missions which are dispersed in four regions of USA (Arum & Roksa, p. 20). The authors chosen the most well-developed and sophisticated part of CLA---performance task which gives students 90 minutes to respond to a writing prompt associated with a set of background documents, to measure their performance in critical thinking, complex reasoning, problem solving, and writing communication, as intended by this assessment (Arum & Roksa, p. 21). By conducting this assessment in the beginning of a freshman year (Fall 2005) and the end of the sophomore year (Spring 2007), the authors were able to find that the students in their sample on average had improved these skills, as measured by the CLA, by only 0.18 standard deviation, that is, a 7 percentile point gain (Arum & Roksa, p. 35), and at least 45% of students didn’t demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in CLA performance during the first 2 years of college (Arum & Roksa, p. 121). Arum and Roksa also discovered the disconcerting education inequality: while African-American students lagged nearly one standard deviation (34%) behind their white peers when entering college, they gained only 7 points in the two CLA scores and white students gained 41 points (Arum & Roksa, pp. 38-39). Through a series of statistical analyses, the author finally explored the possible causes of this limited learning: college preparation (as measured by SAT/ACT score, number of AP courses taken), student study time (especially solitary study time instead of time studying with peers), professors’ expectations and demands (for example, 40 pages of reading per week, and 20 pages of writing for a semester), and institutional types (such as selective schools).

These two books naturally share a lot of commonalities: they both advocate liberal education; they both lament students putting socializing ahead of studying and taking learning as a part-time job; they both point out the underpreparedness of college entrants; they both question the “college for all” ideology; and finally, they both refer to the broader social context of consumer culture and commercialization as contributing factors to academic disengagement. Of course, there are differences between them. First, Lowering Higher Education is dominantly qualitative study, with a big first part dealing with the history of the idea of the university, while Academically adrift is primarily a tight quantitative study. Secondly, Côté and Allahar focus on Canadian (especially Ontario) universities and students while Arum and Roksa deal exclusively with the American context. What strikes me in reading these two books is that Arum and Roksa didn’t quote Côté and Allahar (their first book appeared in 2007).

I think highly of both books, but I do have reservations for both of them. First, Côté and Allahar spare no efforts in criticizing vocationalism or pseudo-vocationalism (one book review pointed out their simple binarism, see Boire, 2012) , but I am wondering whether vocational training (the authors strictly distinguish between education and training) can’t be properly used to cultivate critical thinking, and also, if there is pseudo-vocationalism, might there also be pseudo-liberal education? Since liberal education is hard to measure, we can’t really tell which ways of education indeed contribute to critical thinking. Similarly, Arum and Roksa’s study is heavily against science and engineering students when they asked whether these students read 40 pages, write 20 pages, or both per week. Probably not surprisingly, engineering and computer science concentrators have lowest measures in all these aspects, and significantly lower than the comparison benchmark (with science and math concentrators significantly lower in one measurement, See Arum & Roksa, Table A3.5). I didn’t find the comparison of the CLA scores between students in social sciences and humanities and students in engineering and computer science, or students in science and mathematics, but I think here the research’s validity is in question.

References

Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Boire, G. (2012). Lowering higher education: The rise of corporate universities and the fall of liberal education. GUELPH: University of Toronto Press.

Cote, J.E. & Allahar, A. (2011). Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Côté, J. E., & Allahar, A. L. (2007). Ivory tower blues: A university system in crisis. University of Toronto Press.

Kena, G., Aud, S., Johnson, F., Wang, X., Zhang, J., Rathbun, A., ... & Kristapovich, P. (2014). The Condition of Education 2014 (NCES 2014-083). US Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC. Retrieved [date] from http://nces. ed. gov/pubsearch.

OECD (2014), Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing.