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CHAPTER 1
The Ol' College Try
Lelaina: Quick, Vickie. What's your social security?
Vickie: Uh, 851-25-9357.
Troy: Very impressive.
Vickie: That's the only thing I really learned in college.
— Reality Bites (1994)
Most students learn a lot more in college than Vickie from Reality Bites. One of the most important lessons I learned in college is that labels matter a lot. During sophomore and junior years I dated a girl whose last name was Hong and who had the unfortunate habit of writing "HONG" with a black Sharpie in big block capital letters on literally everything she owned. Every book, clothing label, even her wastebasket was inescapably, inevitably HONG. Sometimes, sitting in her room looking at a plethora of HONG, it was all I could think about.
Back in the day, we listened to music on CD. Over the course of my relationship with Hong, our CD collections became intermingled and remained so even after we broke up. In my senior year I began dating Yahlin. One day when Yahlin was in our common room, she came across a copy of Cat Stevens's Greatest Hits with the telltale HONG obscuring poor Stevens's face. Yahlin knew exactly what the label meant and, in front of my roommate Dave Friedman, spent the better part of the next hour alternatively asking questions and griping. After a while, Dave had had enough and took matters into his own hands. Taking a black Sharpie from his room, he grabbed the CD from Yahlin and vigorously covered HONG until all we could see was Sharpie. Then, immediately below, he wrote in equally large block capital letters: FRIEDMAN.
Dave might have saved my future that day, since Yahlin and I remained together and got married. The point is, labels matter (thanks for the lesson, FRIEDMAN). And while the label of "college graduate" has apparently become a prerequisite for a successful career, it's important to begin any discussion of college with its underlying substantive value. College's educational goals are ambitious and important for both the wealth and health of our country.
When I entered college in 1990, I fell in love with the promise of truly learning to read, write, and think. The physical manifestation of this promise was a thick blue book titled Yale College Programs of Study. It wasn't just the multitude of fascinating courses — each unpacking a suitcase of previously hidden knowledge while also signaling a potential future journey of study and work — that cast a spell. It was also the well-written introduction to the undergraduate curriculum. A college education, the book began, should "cultivate a broadly informed, highly disciplined intellect ... [and provide] a phase of exploration, a place for the exercise of curiosity, and an opportunity for the discovery of new interests and abilities."
The Blue Book went on to say that "to ensure that study is neither too narrowly focused nor too diffuse," students are required to take at least two courses in each of the following areas:
1. Humanities and arts: Exploring "the broad range of human thought, expression, and endeavor — cultivates an educated recognition of the greatest accomplishments of the past and enriches the capacity to participate fully in the life of our time."
2. Science: Developing "critical faculties that educated citizens need. These include an ability to evaluate the opinions of experts, to distinguish special pleading and demagoguery from responsible science, and to realize which things are known and which unknown — which are knowable and which unknowable — to science."
3. Social sciences: Understand the "connections between the familiar and the exotic, the traditional and the contemporary, the individual and the group, the predicted result and the anomalous outcome."
4. Foreign languages: To enhance "understanding of how languages work, often resulting in heightened sophistication in the use of one's own language."
5. Quantitative reasoning: "An educated person must be able to use quantitative information to make, understand, and evaluate arguments."
6. Writing: "The ability to write well is one of the hallmarks of a liberal education."
But, as Yale notes, "the distributional requirements constitute a minimal education, not a complete one." Students are also expected to concentrate their studies in the form of a major. According to the Blue Book:
to study a subject in depth can be one of the most rewarding and energizing of human experiences and can form the basis of the interests and occupations of a lifetime. Knowledge advances by specialization, and one can gain some of the excitement of discovery by pressing toward the outer limits of what is known in a particular field. Intense study of a seemingly narrow area of investigation may disclose ramifications and connections that alter perspectives on other subjects. Such study also sharpens judgment and acquaints a person with processes by which new truths can be found.
Beyond breadth and depth — and what the Blue Book doesn't call out — is that the third leg of the college edifice is perspective transformation: changing frames of reference to reflect on assumptions in order to develop valuable critical thinking skills. Every argument or idea is built on a scaffold of assumptions that may be sturdy enough to last ages or flimsy enough to crumble when poked and prodded. Perspective transformation involves looking at the same argument or idea through different frameworks, typically showing it in very different lights. More than anything else, the ability to do this well is the mark of what we consider an "educated" person (as opposed to intelligent, because this ability comes naturally to few and requires significant training and practice). Perspective transformation is easier to do in liberal arts courses than in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses. But it's essential: the best way to equip students with the skills they'll need to constructively make, advance, and counter ideas and arguments over the course of their lives.
Naturally, all three legs are strengthened by rigor. College is not supposed to be easy. Challenging readings, discussions, problem sets, projects, exams, and lots and lots of writing do improve thinking, not to mention work habits. Students who make it through the four-year gauntlet will have developed skills that will be useful for life.
Sounds good, right? Done right, it is a very good thing — not only in terms of personal development but economically as well. As one college president wrote recently, "an effective traditional college experience pushes students to learn beyond their own bubbles, exceed their perceived limits and discover new strengths and interests they have not thought about — skills that are crucial to career success." College degrees have become the ticket to upward mobility and a symbol of the American Dream: an investment in college is an investment in yourself and your future.
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College has become so engrained in the modern mind as the path to a good life that it's hard to fathom that there wasn't always a higher education monoculture of bachelor's degrees. But back in the colonial era very few students actually completed degrees or earned any credential. Students attended college for a year or two and then departed. And why not? After all, college degrees weren't required for professions like law or medicine. Some historians believe the growth in demand for degrees was initially a by-product of the popularity of commencement ceremonies.
Ultimately, as our oldest institutions began to develop elite reputations, degrees became an alumni quality assurance mechanism: if this student says he was educated at our institution, we'd best ensure he's been educated to our standards. Still, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colleges and degrees served the sons of the merchant elite. College attendance and the bachelor's degree signified the social status of the father as much as the education of the son.
It was only after World War II — with the GI bill and massive new investments at the state (public university systems) and federal (Pell Grants and student loans) levels — that college degrees became commonplace, rising from 5 percent of adults to more than 30 percent. So it's really within the past two generations that college has expanded from an elite audience to the mass market pursuant to the belief that bachelor's degrees should and could serve all students. As degree prevalence doubled between 1970 and 1990, employers across virtually every industry began to utilize them as a crude general ability screening mechanism for most entry-level jobs.
So when young adults entered the labor market, the prevailing view was that if you wanted to get a good job, you needed a college degree. And there's no question that this remains the prevailing view, substantiated by the fact that employment outcomes remain far better for those with a degree than those without: Unemployment rates are much lower for college graduates as a group, and over the course of their lives, college graduates earn nearly $1 million more than high school graduates.
Of course, if all talented and motivated students feel compelled by the social norm to go to college and earn degrees — leaving behind less talented and motivated students — it would be awfully strange if college graduates didn't earn more. This self-selection bias gives rise to what I call the "dystopian counterfactual": what if the many documented advantages of earning a college degree stem primarily from the talent and motivation required to complete a college degree — not to mention the family background, wealth, and support that provided the path to college — rather than from value added by a college education?
There's no easy solution to the dystopian counterfactual. So we will try to triangulate our way to a point of view on whether the institution of college is working and, if so, for whom.
The first and most important point is that only about half of all students who enroll in four-year colleges in the United States complete a degree within six years. While it's possible some may take longer, the overall completion rate is not higher than 55 percent, meaning 45 percent of students who attempt college fail to get over the bar. That means no credential of value and therefore wasted time and money.
And yet each year hope springs eternal as millions of new students enroll in thousands of colleges and universities. Eighty-one percent of students who start at community college for the first time think they'll eventually earn a bachelor's degree, but only 12 percent do. In this respect September on campus is reminiscent of New Year's Day at the gym: everyone signs up with the best of intentions, but life tends to get in the way. Although there are signs hope may be dissipating. The 2017 College Confidence Index from Allianz Tuition Insurance indicates 55 percent of entering college students are "not very confident" that they will successfully earn a degree.
The fact that college degrees have become the primary screening mechanism for good jobs, and that nearly half of all Americans who attempt the credential fail to complete it, creates a feeling that our system is rigged. For those without degrees, there's a strong sense that no matter what they do, they're unable to get ahead and, in fact, are falling behind.
* * *
Students who are talented and motivated enough to complete degree programs are not without their own challenges. First and foremost, there's substantial evidence that many students are not benefiting from teaching and/or learning. By filing public records requests at one hundred public colleges and universities, the Wall Street Journal obtained test results from sixty-eight institutions for the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Plus, a cognitive test administered to freshmen and seniors by about two hundred colleges and universities. The Journal found that one-third of seniors are unable to make a coherent argument, interpret data in a table, or assess the quality of evidence in a document. While the majority of students demonstrated some measurable progress in critical thinking, some flagship universities like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kentucky showed little improvement. And at universities like the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, three-quarters of seniors demonstrated critical thinking skills that fell in the "basic" or "below basic" categories. Nationwide, CLA reports that 40 percent of seniors fall into these two lowest categories. Further, a recent survey of employers by the Association of American Colleges and Universities revealed only 26 percent thought new college graduates had "excellent" critical thinking skills.
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) surveys hundreds of thousands of American college students on their attitudes toward higher education. According to NSSE, only 10 percent of students are fully engaged. Somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of students are fully disengaged. And the remainder are in the middle.
These numbers are consistent with the findings of Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, who in their 2011 book Academically Adrift reported that more than one-third of students failed to materially improve critical thinking and writing capabilities over the course of their college experience. They also found that college is much less rigorous than generally thought. Few courses demand that students read more than forty pages per week or write twenty-page papers. Average study time is only twelve hours per week. A third of students surveyed study less than five hours per week. In fact, the Heritage Foundation has calculated that the average college student spends 2.76 hours per day on education-related activities but 4.4 hours per day on leisure activities "not including shopping, grooming, personal care, housework, cooking, or eating."
In The Five-Year Party, Craig Brandon, a former journalism instructor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, describes a typical day in his class: "None of my twenty-two students would be taking notes and only a few would be paying attention. Two would be asleep with their heads down on the desks, three would be listening to their iPods or texting messages on their cell phones, four would be engaged in a lively conversation among themselves about the awesome party they went to last night ... Only two or three students would have read the assignment for the day ... No one would ask a question and 90 percent of them were simply filling a seat." He reports conversations with "more than a hundred professors" who have dumbed down courses and lowered the grading curve.
Brandon lays the blame squarely at the feet of administrators focused on enrollment, retention, and the bottom line rather than ensuring students actually learn something. He has choice words for the current system, alternating between "massive scam" and "widespread fraud." "The inconvenient truth," claims Brandon, "is that only the best colleges in America still consider 'education' to be their primary mission."
One UK commentator, writing in the Times of London in 2017, claimed the problem was the "all must have prizes" approach, which eroded the meaning of educational achievement. When everyone was supposed to be able to get university degrees, she said, universities were forced to lower their standards. According to her, "standards did indeed fall" in the UK. "It wasn't just questionable courses being introduced in adventure tourism, personal training or the like. It was a devaluation across the board."
Adding the 45 percent of students who don't complete to the percentage of graduates who don't appear to be learning anything of note — which I conservatively estimate at about one-third — only 37 percent of students are experiencing positive outcomes from college; 63 percent are not.
* * *
Another inconvenient truth is that only $0.21 out of every tuition dollar is actually spent on instruction. What colleges and universities are spending on is administration, for one. At small colleges, spending on administrative staff (deans and associate deans) amounts to $0.64 out of every $1.00; instruction is the remaining $0.36. And this only includes support of core academic operations, not student activities, financial aid, or any other of the many functions provided by colleges and universities. Over the past twenty-five years, the number of administrators grew twice as fast as the number of students.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A New U"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ryan Craig.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
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