Co-Authors, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Richard Arum (New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia) are co-authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press). Academically Adrift examines how individual experiences and institutional contexts are related to students’ development of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills during the first two years of college. According to the findings they documented in their book, a significant number of university students in America failed to develop “core” skills, (critical thinking, reasoning, and writing skills) after four years of college education.

Read more about the authors, below the following embedded document. Always find the latest about their session at SCUP's conference here. The document, below, links to a constantly interesting daily "newspaper" about the book and the controversy surrounding it. Let us know if you enjoy it: terry.calhoun@scup.org.

• 45% of the students included in the study “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during their first two years of college.
• 36% of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” after four years of college.
• Students who study alone gain more knowledge, while those who spend more time studying in groups “see diminishing gains.”
• Liberal arts students see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written skills” compared to other students.
• A third of students were not taking courses, which required them to read more than 40 pages per week.
• Students who were enrolled in classes, which required them to read more than 40 pages a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester gained more than other students.

The research project that led to the book was organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) as part of its collaborative partnership with the Pathways to College Network and is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford, Lumina, and Teagle Foundations.

Continue the discussion! This plenary session will be followed by a concurrent session discussion panel addressing the topic of what constitutes educational quality, how do we assess it, and, most importantly, how do we improve it? 

Richard Arum
Professor of Sociology and Education
New York University

Richard Arum is professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also director of the Education Research Program of the Social Science Research Council, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools. He is the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools (Harvard University Press, 2003), and co-editor of a comparative study on expansion, differentiation and access to higher education in fifteen countries, Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007). Arum received a Masters of Education in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Josipa Roksa
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Virginia

Josipa Roksa is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia (UVA), with a courtesy appointment in the Curry School of Education. She is also a Fellow of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. Roksa’s primary research interests are in social stratification and higher education. Her research has been published inSocial Forces, Sociology of Education, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Teachers College Record, andSocial Science Research. She received her BA, summa cum laude, in Psychology from Mount Holyoke College, and PhD in Sociology from New York University (NYU).

For more information about Academically Adrift:

A perspective from The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Wall Street Journal Video Interview with Richard Arum

Excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses(University of Chicago Press) in The Chronicle of Higher Education online.

Inside Higher Ed: Academically Adrift