That’s the question that authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa ask and answer in their book Academically Adrift.
They report:
- Forty-five percent of students barely tick upward in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing after two years of college, and 36 percent don’t budge in those skills after four years.
- Four-year institutions only graduate about a third of their students in four years, and two-thirds of them in six.
- Student debt just surpassed the country’s credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year … For the class of 2011, the mean student-debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.
- In the early 1960s, college students spent 40 hours per week on academic work; now they spend only 27 hours per week. In 1961, 67 percent of students said they studied more than 20 hours per week; now only one in five study that much.
- Miraculously, grades haven’t dropped, despite less study … students have mastered “the art of college management,” whereby they succeed at “controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload.”
- “Faculty spend approximately 11 hours per week on advisement and instructional preparation and delivery.” The rest is devoted to research and sundry other professional and administrative tasks.
- Campus hiring has been devoted to “managerial professionals” specializing in sundry student services. What kind of learning environment is it, after all, without a director of sustainability initiatives?
If increasingly students don’t study, teachers don’t teach, and college employees aren’t primarily concerned with either, it raises the question of what the hell happens on campus.
Well, many students have a grand time during a years-long vacation from real life.
They enjoy state-of-the-art facilities, socialize, and figure how to come away with the credential of a degree in exchange for minimal effort.
Not exactly a formula for efficiency or success.
The Homa Files 
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