Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift; Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska

This was the book of the semester for Honors Colloquium Winter Semester 2011. This took my feelings of school and backed it up with data. There is something wrong with the data though because they won't openly share any more than they have included in the book. One of the professors at my school emailed them and they refused due to "privacy issues". My professor believed that this meant some info may have been taken out of context.

However, the idea remains. They tested over several colleges not for intelligence or knowledge in any subject but for growth in skills such as written communication, complex reasoning, and critical thinking. Across all campuses, there was little to no improvement. A lot of the reasons are because of the present day attitudes of the purposes of universities.

Many professors are more concerned about their own research than about the quality of learning their students obtain. They make their classes easy so that the students will rate high therefore ensuring that they keep their jobs. All the professors then have to lower the bar to remain employed. Another problem is that students do not value learning so much as they want to steadily keep up good grades and obtain a diploma. If there is any intellectual value behind that diploma, they don't care. Also, because of how many universities there are, parents and students go "shopping" with the idea in mind of the quality of the facilities, percent of graduates, and how much financial aid would be able to cover the costs of university life. No one is really thinking about learning and the employers of the new graduates are less than impressed.

Some problems people will have in improving the situation is that professors can use their high status and knowledge of writing to speak out against any changes that would give them more responsibilities or a larger work load. It is not only the students that are trying to laze about. Students need to have a love of lifelong learning so that they actually put in effort to their classes whereas right now they don't have a sense of purpose. They aren't looking for what would be meaningful in life, but instead on what will help them to be well off financially. Guess which major had the lowest gains in learning? Business. Highest? Science and Math, closely followed by HUMANITIES/ ARTS (take that king arthur). Anyways here is an example of that generation that I so dispise
"I don't really have any goals for my future. What's the big deal about that? It would be fun to travel. I'd like that, especially if I could get someone to pay for it"
Talk about boomerang generation. In some of their surveys, most students had never taken a course that cumulatively required them to write 20 pages or to read 40 pages a week. Not even 400 level clases. Instead a lot of the classes with titles relating to race, gender, sex, cinema, film or movie is what students were drawn towards.

The sad thing is that Universities used to be so much different. Dorms were built so that students would be able to live in a community where they are constantly enriching each others intellectual endeavors. All of student life was built around education. Now days, it is all about social life. How sad is that? It is fine for there to be activities and to give yourself a break, but if you are socializing more than you are studying, that is NOT what a university is all about. Thats what this retarded generation is about though. How sad.