Academically Adrift?

About a year and a half ago a book came out that set the academic world aflutter.  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by sociologists Richard Arum and Jopisa Roksa argue, essentially, that colleges aren't doing their jobs.  (For purposes of full disclosure, my fiance knows both of the authors and is in regular correspondence with Roksa.  I haven't met either one, but just in case, I wanted my readers to know there might be an influence.)

First and foremost, I should note that even though the book has received a lot of mainstream attention, it is not written for mainstream readers.  It is an academic book with an academic audience in mind.  If you aren't accustomed to reading "social sciency" material, I would highly recommend reading good summaries.  Even with advanced degrees in the social sciences, some of the tables intimidated me and gave me flashbacks to dreaded statistics classes.  But, if you can get past that, they have some important findings that I think those of us in the higher education field should take seriously.

Perhaps their most important finding is that students are not learning how to do higher level thinking.  45% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement in learning after 2 years of college and 36% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement after 4 years.  (Just a technical note, "significant" doesn't actually mean "a lot" in this type of context.  It means something like, "enough that we don't think the difference was accidental".  A significant improvement can actually be very small when dealing with technical statistics.)

So, what was the cause of this seeming failure of colleges?  Arum and Roksa argue that there are a few influences, but by far the largest is a lack of academic rigor.  Basically, we professors are being too easy on the students, and not forcing them to improve their learning and thingking skills.  Other findings include students not spending enough time studying (because they don't have to because the classes are easy), students are spending too much time socializing and working jobs, and the studying that does take place is in less than ideal settings (especially "studying" with friends). In perhaps their finding that got the most people mad, they found the students in business, communication, education and social work majors overall had significantly lower levels of higher thinking skills.

I want to emphasize that I have not done any scientific research and the following is based strictly on personal observations.  In other words, these are just my personal, very unscientific thoughts:

1. Students tend to take the easier courses with easier professors when they can.  Then, to get class numbers up, faculty are somewhat pressured to ease up on the work so they can increase their class sizes.
2. The rule of thumb for studying is that you should spend 2 hours outside of class for every hour you spend inside class.  When I work with students and they lay out how they spend their weeks, it is usually the inverse.
3. Too many students do lack higher thinking skills.  It amazes me.  Constantly.  I can't figure out how some of these students got into college, let alone how they managed to survive so long in college.  Given their thought patterns, they shouldn't be passing 2/3 of their classes.  (Of course, I am under pressure to give such students a C just so we don't have to continue to deal with them.)  
4. Some majors do a much better job of teaching thinking skills than others.  While it will change from institution to institution, I recognize some of the same trends as the book authors.  However, to be positive, I would like to cite philosophy departments for doing a supurb job with their students.  (Although, to be fair, there is probably a selection bias there since only students interested in higher-level thinking would become a philosophy major in the first place.)
5. While some students appear to me to be lazy, some are honestly over-worked.  Those who are trying to work a 30-hour per week job to pay for college are shooting themselves in the foot.  If you take 15 credit horus (roughly the average course load on a semester system), you will be in class 15 hours per week.  If you do spend the amount of time doing school work, 2 hours outside for every hour inside, you are up to 45 hours per week to be a full time student.  If you then work 30 hours at a job, you are up to 75 hours.  A typical 19 year-old won't be able to do that.  So what gets lost? Doing work outside of school.  When I show this math to these students, I tell them that if their financial situation is really that bad, they shouldn't be a full time student.  Take fewer classes.  It's okay to take longer to graduate.