Your so-called education...

[groovedaddy]

COMMENCEMENT is a special time on college campuses: an occasion for students, families, faculty and administrators to come together to celebrate a job well done. And perhaps there is reason to be pleased. In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences.

We would be happy to join in the celebrations if it weren’t for our recent research, which raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning in the United States. Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.

Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

[izquierdista]

1. The poor professors don't get it

In the second to last paragraph, they advise "parents and students on college tours could ignore institutional facades and focus on educational substance". They have, guys, as you yourselves point out, when they see rigorous courses, they run away from them as fast as possible.

[exboyfil]

5. Anything that endangers a high GPA for access

to jobs and med school will not be taken. Rigor is ok, but if you are getting a B for doing as well or better as someone else getting an A, you are going to avoid the course like the plague.

As much as standardized tests get criticized, they are still an important benchmark to rating students. GPA to a large degree can be meaningless.

[exboyfil]

2. Interesting breakout by major

Social Studies/Humanities and Science/Math at 1250. Engineering at 1210. Education, Communication, and Business at 1190. I have to admit I am a little surprised that the engineers are not more competitive. At least at my undergraduate school they did quite well in their classes outside their major. I wonder if the ABET engineers were grouped with Engineering Technology?

[cloudbase]

3. Academic rigor pays off down the road.

http://www.payscale.com/education/average-cost-for-college-ROI

[tishaLA]

4. this:

"The situation reflects a larger cultural change in the relationship between students and colleges. The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as “clients” or “consumers.” When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right."

is accurate. Many students really believe that they are, in effect, your customer and it's your duty to provide customer service. While I think this is in part true--too many full professors only have time for their grad students, and only a chosen few grad students--it's a large part of the pathology. It's also one of the ways universities choose to penalize professors: by selectively looking at student evaluations (usually of more difficult instructors) and denying tenure or rejecting promotions.

[damntexdem]

6. Well, having spent the last three years on a committee both ...

recommending changes in our university's core curriculum and revamping assessment of it, I guess I'll see what can come of that.

[patrice]

7. Do you think tuition increases affect these expectations?

Higher expenses create the expectation of something more suited to one's every desire, including those related to ease of accomplishment?

[tishaLA]

8. I don't really think it's tuition increases; I think it's more cultural

and, although my university doesn't have an undergrad business major (we do have undergrad economics majors, though), I suspect that the businessification of undergraduate education plays a big part in this. If we are training people in what amounts to a vocational school to create business professionals, there's almost necessarily a slippage of the business school ethos into the undergrad population.

But to my mind, the business school major is just a symptom of a cultural shift away from treasuring critical thinking/abstraction toward "useful" knowledge. On my own evaluations from non-majors, it's a problem I confront. The evals ask, among other things, about the use value of the class. While most of my non-majors teaching involves a good deal of writing--but not too much!--it's a hard case to make that learning how to scan a poem, or being able to recognize and define enjambment, metonymy, and synecdoche is a useful skill. What's more, I wonder what percentage of my teaching should go toward "useful" skills and what percentage of it should be about helping them be critically engaged, thinking people.

[eridani]

9. +100 n/t

If schools are businesses, they should NEVER require too much hard work.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. The invisible bloody hand of the Free Market strikes again!

Let's not forget it was Newt Gingrich, perhaps more than anyone else, who was responsible for twisting the metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas" (in which ideas are accepted and used, or rejected and neglected, on merit) into a literal, force-fit economic picture of education as a commodity, which could be extruded like so much steel railing and priced according to quantity. No single idea has been more harmful to education in the last half-century or so.

That's the problem with fundies -- they take metaphors literally, but freely interpret the most clear-cut edicts as mere guidelines. The Seventh Commandment springs readily to mind.