The Great Myth of America’s ‘Knowledge Economy’| News
“IN THE 21st century, the best anti-poverty programme around is a first-class education,” President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were going through the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.
The image is of toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again - out-thinking, out-knowing the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high tech economies of tomorrow.
As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk, it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The two profs followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at 29 universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2,000-plus four-year college institutions.
Among the authors’ findings: 32 per cent of the students whom they followed in an average semester did not take any courses that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half did not take any courses in which more than 20 pages of writing were assigned throughout the entire term.
Furthermore, 35 per cent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone. Typical students spent about 16 per cent of their time on academic pursuits, and were “academically engaged”, write the authors, less than 30 hours a week.
After two years in college, 45 per cent of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36 per cent showed little change. And the students who did show improvement only logged very modest gains. Students spent 50 per cent less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.
One of the co-authors, Richard Arum, says college governing boards, shoveling out colossal sums to their presidents, athletic coaches and senior administrative staff, now demand that the focus be “student retention”, also known as not kicking anyone out for not doing any measurable work. As Arum put it to Money College, “Students are much more likely to drop out of school when they are not socially engaged, and colleges and universities increasingly view students as consumers and clients. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all students want to be exposed to a rigorous academic programme.”