June 24, 2011 by Bill

The recent, gloomy book about our higher education system, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, has sparked much debate. So has a documentary about high school students desperate to get into good colleges, Race to Nowhere. Put the two together and it starts to look like young people are stressing out and over-achieving in high school to get into the right universities, then not learning much when they get there. Is that true, and if so, how did we get here?

At first, what struck me about the book and the movie was how differently they see the situation. Academically Adrift, a rigorous sociological study written by Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, assesses the “value added” by undergraduate education in America — in other words, learning outcomes. The story is not a happy one. Based on results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a standardized national instrument designed to measure critical thinking, the authors find that many of our college students have experienced little in the way of measurable learning during their undergrad years. To be specific, almost half of students (45%) showed no significant improvement on the CLA. Not exactly a passing grade for American higher education.

(Whether the CLA actually measures this accurately is a question unto itself. For the moment, let’s take it at face value and assume it does a decent job of assessing critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, writing, and other skills we want our colleges to teach.)

Then there’s the Race to Nowhere phenomenon. The film, co-directed by Vicki Abeles and Jessica Congdon, has garnered attention through grassroots distribution: screenings at schools followed by discussions among parents and teachers. That’s how I saw it recently at the school one of my children attends. The film tells the stories of high-schoolers pushed to the brink, working extremely hard, anxious about getting into the best colleges, depressed, and eventually burned out.

These kids are many things, but they are not “academically adrift.” They’re learning plenty. But they’re also paying the price for those achievements in areas like health, happiness, and quality of life. They are driven simultaneously to academic success and emotional collapse. 

Now, these are highly motivated, high-achieving students; obviously they don’t represent the full range of high schoolers in America. But with more prospects applying to a greater number of highly selective colleges each year, those colleges are becoming even more selective, and the race is only heating up. Race to Nowhere is a sobering look at an important and growing part of the higher ed ecosystem.

So the book and the film tell very different stories, and the two seem to be in tension with each other. Take the issue of homework (as they call it in high school) and time spent studying (in college). The authors of Academically Adrift noted in a New York Times op-ed that the average college student spends only 12 to 13 hours per week studying, about half of what she spent in 1960. In contrast, the question in high school circles is how to stem the rising tide of homework and give students their lives back a little. Another recent Times article cited Race to Nowhere as one of the catalysts for new policies by school districts to limit the time that students spend on homework. In the film, and in the discussions sparked by it among parents, it’s clear that many grade school and high school students are spending hours every night on homework.

So is the problem too little studying or too much? How can students be spending more time studying in high school than they do in college? And what’s the relationship between the two? ...

As I’ve struggled to reconcile these pictures, I’ve realized they may be depicting the same problem from different angles. A thoughtful piece in the New Yorker by Louis Menand a few weeks ago provides some useful insights. Having taught at an Ivy League school as well as a public university, Menand muses about a question that students in the public university (but rarely the Ivy) ask him: “Why do I have to read this book?” Menand views this as the tip of a deeper iceberg of a question, “What is the return on investment of a college education?” 

He ponders that bigger question in light of two theories about the education system. The first theory holds that higher education in America is largely a sorting or selection process. It identifies the more intelligent members of society, who then, armed with the proper credential asserting their abilities, become eligible for prestigious careers and/or advanced study. 

That theory, I thought, could certainly help explain why high school students line up in such numbers to run the race to nowhere. They understand — or their parents and society impress upon them — that getting into a good college will open doors that would otherwise remain closed. It is the golden ticket to a land of opportunities, and is therefore worth great sacrifice. 

But does it also explain those adrift college students? Well, if college is mostly about the credential and passing through the gate in the first place, then getting merely decent grades is good enough. Why hit the books all night, why continue the sacrifices that were necessary in high school when you’ve already won the sorting game and are in the process of being stamped “Approved!” Add to that the burnout that many college freshman experience after spending their high school years focused on amassing as many AP courses, academic honors, extra-curricular activities, and community service internships as humanly possible, and it’s no wonder that many decide it’s time to take an intellectual break.

But can we really have arrived at a point in American education where college is considered a break? I hope not. Let’s try Menand’s other theory.

Theory number two holds that college teaches students things they wouldn’t learn otherwise, and that learning these things is enlightening and empowering. What and how much students learn in college does matter, because that’s what really opens the door to opportunities — not the credential but the knowledge and skills that students build while on campus. It’s their ability to think critically, analyze and solve problems, and communicate their ideas that leads to long-term success in society.

As Menand suggests, those partial to theory 2 (as he confesses he is, and I join him) see the high-school race to nowhere as something akin to tulip mania: a speculative bubble in which the price people are willing to pay for a widely-desired but finite good (in this case, a place at an elite college) is temporarily driven sky high. If education is really about what we learn and how we grow intellectually and personally, then it can happen for different people in different ways at all kinds of colleges. There’s no reason for a collective race to a single, narrowly-defined “top.”

Nor does theory 2 explain or excuse being academically adrift while in college. Students who subscribe to this theory should be inclined to be highly engaged in learning and eager to shape their college experiences for maximum growth. As my colleague Rachelle Brooks suggested to me, the problem may be that most students don’t think of college education in those terms: they don’t subscribe to theory 2 or anything like it, because those beneficial outcomes of learning have never been communicated to them by the system in which they came up. After all, in their K–12 experience the emphasis has been on the race (via all that teaching to the test) rather than the learning itself or the empowerment it affords. (By the way, don’t miss Rachelle’s wonderful blog post on Academically Adrift from a few months ago.) 

Both theories involve generalizations, of course. Many college students are deeply and productively engaged in learning; we’ve heard their voices in our own research at Slover Linett. And many high school students have achieved balance and sanity while still demonstrating their potential. But broadly speaking, theory 1 does a far better job explaining the dual picture presented by the book and the film. Culturally, we do seem to be moving in the direction of the sorting and stamping model. In fact, the growing call for better measurement and outcomes assessment at the college level may be a reaction to exactly that trend.

So where are we headed, as a nation, if the trend continues? Are we, to mix the metaphors, drifting to nowhere? Or are both problems (high school stress and college slack) overstated, and all is largely well? I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are your own experiences as a student, parent, professor, administrator or just an observant citizen? And do they jibe or not with Academically Adrift and Race to Nowhere?
 

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