The Chronicle of Higher Education - February 17, 2012

MORE COMMENTARY INSIDE:
When the President’s Daughter Is a Student
Dad’s View: Page A29
Mark Putnam reflects on the challenges and advantages
of having his daughter attend the college he leads.

My President, My Dad
Emma’s View: Page A29
Emma Putnam provides her own perspective on what it’s like
to have her dad also be her college president.

THINK TANK
By Kevin Carey

IN THE LAST few months of 2010, rumors began circulat- ing among higher-education policy geeks that the Uni- versity of Chicago Press was about to publish a new book
written by a pair of very smart soci-
ologists who were trying to answer a
question to which most people thought
they already knew the answer: How
much do students learn while they’re
in college? Their findings, one heard,
were ... interesting.
The book, Academically Adrift,
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa,
fulfilled that promise—and then some.
It was no surprise that The Chronicle
gave prominent coverage to the conclu-
sion that “American higher education
is characterized by limited or no learn-
ing for a large proportion of students,”
but few people anticipated that the
book would become the rare piece
of serious academic scholarship that
jumps the fence and roams free into
the larger culture.
Vanity Fair used space normally al-
lotted to Kennedy hagiography to call
it a “crushing exposé of the heretofore
secret society known as ‘college.’ ” The
gossip mavens at Gawker ran the book
through their patented Internet cynicism machine and wrote
that “To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crush-
ing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money?
Not learning.”
The New Yorker featured Academically Adrift in a typi-
cally brilliant essay by Louis Menand. In one of her nation-
ally syndicated columns, Kathleen Parker called the book
a “dense tome” while opining that the failure of higher
education constituted a “dot-connecting exercise for Uncle
Shoulda, who someday will say—in Chinese—‘How could
we have let this happen?’ ” Her response proved that Kath-
leen Parker has a gift for phrasing and did not actually read
the book, whose main text runs to only 144 concise and well-
argued pages.
But the definitive evidence of Academically Adrift’s ascen-
sion to the very small group of social-science studies whose
findings shape conventional wisdom came when President
King, the world-weary cynic and longtime leader of Walden
College, sipped a martini and reacted to the book’s docu-
mentation of declining student work by explaining, “That’s
why they come! As long as we give them good grades and a
degree, their parents are happy too! Who cares if they can’t
reason?”
When your research ends up in “Doonesbury,” that’s say-
ing something.
In part, it says that the public harbored a latent distrust of
higher education that was activated by empirical evidence
that supported their suspicions. After all, a lot of people have
been to college and have experienced the academic indif-
is that most of the people running things
in politics, business, and academe come
from the first group, but most of the
actual students enrolled in college are in
the second group. The former cannot see
the latter, because they are blinded by
their own experience. And so they think
the problems of the many don’t exist.

MICHAEL MORGENSTERN FOR THE CHRONICLE
‘Academically Adrift’:
The News Gets Worse and Worse

ference and lack of rigor that Arum and Roksa documented
firsthand.
It also shows what happens when there’s a mismatch between
the importance and complexity of a question and the amount of
research designed to answer it. In many ways, the most shock-
ing thing about Academically Adrift was not what it revealed
about what college students learn. It was that nobody had ever
attempted to measure learning in that way before.
As responsible scholars, the authors were careful to
interpret their findings in ways that emphasized the limita-
tions of their instruments and sample population. But they
couldn’t control what happened after their research entered
the zeitgeist. And the lack of other credible studies providing
alternate perspectives on college learning meant that, in the
national higher-education conversation, Academically Adrift
became the only game in town.
Last month the authors released new results that should only
add to our national worries about higher education. While press
coverage of Academically Adrift focused mostly on learning
among typical students, the data actually show two distinct
populations of undergraduates. Some students, disproportion-
ately from privileged backgrounds, matriculate well prepared
for college. They are given challenging work to do and respond
by learning a substantial amount in four years.
Other students graduate from mediocre or bad high schools
and enroll in less-selective colleges that don’t challenge them
academically. They learn little. Some graduate anyway, if they’re
able to manage the bureaucratic necessities of earning a degree.
The central problem in American higher education today
Kevin Carey is policy director at Education Sector, an inde-
pendent think tank in Washington.

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