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? ...

This is my first blog post as a research fellow at Slover Linett. Bill invited me to comment on Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book that was published this week and has quickly sparked debate. For those of you who don't know me, I work in assessment at Northwestern University and am the principal investigator of the Teagle Assessment Project and other national studies of student outcomes. But enough about me...

My first-grader took an online standardized math assessment for the first time last month. “It was so easy, Mom,” he told me, “Anne and I raced to see who would get done first.” “I can believe that,” said his teacher when she looked at his score during our parent-teacher conference. He had missed some easy questions in his haste, so the test didn’t even offer him the subsequent hard questions, which the teacher knew he was capable of answering correctly. In the world of high-stakes testing, there were no stakes as far as my son was concerned. And the testing instrument didn’t seem to do a good job of measuring what he knew.

This week, a new book based on undergraduates’ scores on an online standardized assessment is receiving a lot of attention in the higher ed world (see The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the NY Times). The sound-byte is that students aren’t learning very much in college. And everyone is to blame: faculty who don’t take teaching seriously enough, presidents and boards and a tenure system that doesn’t reward teaching, colleges that don’t provide challenging curricula, students who prefer partying over studying. The list goes on.

But I have to stop and ask, how good is our ability to measure what students are learning in college? And how motivated are students to show us what they’ve learned when we ask them to do so using a standardized test? ...

On Fridays at noon, our office suspends the hustle and bustle of meetings, report writing, and phone calls and becomes a seminar room. We gather around our conference table to eat lunch and turn our attention to a topic, trend, or technique important to our work. At some point these lunches were dubbed (somewhat ironically) Slover Linett University, which was inevitably shortened to SLU.

These seminars run the gamut from skill-building workshops about, say, linear regression or ethnographic observation, to broader knowledge-building discussions about newly-released studies or articles, our own recent research findings, or a conference one of us just attended.

I learned about SLU during the interview process before I began working here, and I remember thinking how great it is for a workplace to provide a structure for employees to stay up-to-date on issues relevant to their field. I’ve only been here a few months, but I’ve already learned so much from just a handful of SLU sessions.

With eleven people here in the office, we’re still small enough that communication is pretty easy. But with our three senior associates specializing in different sectors — higher ed, performing arts, and museums — it’s harder than it looks to keep everyone up-to-date about what we’re learning. The weekly SLU lunches keep us all in the loop across all of our projects, so that important findings, ideas, and lessons learned stay fresh in our collective mind.
 

SLU was on vacation over the summer, as vacations and work-related travel took many of us out of the office. But now that it’s Fall, we’re beginning the new “academic year.” Here are a few of the topics that will be on the table (along with our lunches and notebooks): ... 
 

Our recent study on social media usage by colleges and universities has been generating conversation, predictably enough given the hot topic. But what’s the real revolution that’s occurring? It has to do with who’s communicating with whom.

Our study for the Council on Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), which we undertook in partnership with mStoner, was designed to give university development, alumni relations, and marketing professionals insights into what their peers are doing with social media, and why. We found that the biggest reason schools are investing time and money in social media is because their alumni (and other constituents) want them to. It’s expected, and it’s how an increasing proportion of alumni want to communicate with their alma mater.

No surprise there. And another recent piece of research amplifies this point. The U.S. News commissioned the Engagement Strategies Group to survey alumni around the country and learned that 47% of young alumni don’t feel their colleges do enough to connect with them, other than soliciting donations. So alumni want their schools to take a more active role in forging those relationships. That doesn’t mean more communication, of course. It means better communication.

Which brings us right back to social media, because Facebook, Twitter, and other network-driven communication platforms aren’t just new channels to carry the university’s message to alumni (or prospective or current students). They’re not even merely two-way streets: they’re whole neighborhoods of “streets,” new communities of information and exchange. 

A slide from our presentation at the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders, 2010. ...