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? ...

NPR has been no slouch when it comes to social networking and now has more than a million Facebook fans. It recently surveyed that population, and the findings raise a question that has me and my colleagues wondering: how segmented is the social media audience by platform?

Social networking is on our minds quite a bit these days at Slover Linett, and not just in my own domain, higher ed. As many of you know, our collaborative study with CASE and mStoner looked at how colleges and universities are using social media for fundraising and alumni relations. Cheryl presented initial findings in New York and the research was written up in the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. And we’re conducting several surveys to help performing arts organizations understand how their audiences are using interactive technologies to connect with the institution and engage with the art form.

So the new NPR study caught my eye, and based on the 9 slides that their in-house research group has shared publicly, it looks like wonderful work. Some of the findings were a little surprising to me (which I always enjoy — surprises in research reports are like plot twists in a mystery novel). Perhaps the most interesting surprise was the apparent lack of overlap between NPR’s Facebook fans and its Twitter followers.

Only about 8% of the Facebook fans who participated in the survey say they also follow NPR on Twitter. Yet NPR has well over two million Twitter followers (the numbers are complicated because different departments and on-air personalities have their own Twitter accounts; NPR Politics has 1.8 million followers, and Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has 1.3 million).

So clearly there are plenty of NPR Facebook fans who aren’t following the organization on Twitter, and vice versa. NPR researchers Andy Carvin and Noel Cody, who posted the results I just linked to in NPR's research blog, were also surprised by this and note that the two communities appear to be more mutually exclusive than they thought. ...