Academically Adrift Part 1

Academically Adrift.

Limited Learning on College Campuses.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.

Acknowledgments.

The research project that led to this book was organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) as part of its collaborative partners.h.i.+p with the Pathways to College Networka"an alliance of national organizations that advances college opportunity for underserved students by raising public awareness, supporting innovative research, and promoting evidence-based policies and practices across the Ka"12 and higher-education sectors. The initial conception and organizational impetus for this endeavor grew out of efforts led by former SSRC program director Sheri Ranis. Ann Coles, former director of the Pathways to College Network, provided critical a.s.sistance in gaining external support for this project. Other members of the Pathways to College Network leaders.h.i.+p team, including Alma Peterson and Cheryl Blanco, also provided support for our efforts over the past several years. In addition, we are grateful to Mich.e.l.le Cooper, Alisa Cunningham, and Lorelle Espinosa at the Inst.i.tute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), who have supported this project through their current leaders.h.i.+p roles in the Pathways to College Network.

This research project was made possible by generous support from the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Teagle Foundation, as well as a 2007a"8 Fulbright New Century Scholar aHigher Education in the 21st Century: Access and Equitya award. The following foundation officers provided critical support and advice that has proven essential for the success of this project: Tina Gridiron Smith and Dewayne Matthews, as well as Jamie Merisotis and Susan Johnson (Lumina Foundation); Jorge Balan and Greg Andersen (Ford Foundation); Barbara Gombach (Carnegie Corporation of New York); and Donna Heiland and W. Robert Connor (Teagle Foundation). We are also profoundly grateful to Roger Benjamin, Alex Nemeth, Heather Kugelma.s.s, Marc Chun, Esther Hong, James Padilla, and Stephen Klein at the Council for Aid to Education for technical collaboration in data collection that made this research possible. Moreover, we would like to express our deep grat.i.tude to the administrators who coordinated site-based data collection and staff at the twenty-four inst.i.tutions that supported the fieldwork required for this project, as well as to the students who volunteered and consented to partic.i.p.ate in this research study.

The researchers are also appreciative of input from the projectas advisory board: Pedro Reyes, professor and a.s.sociate vice chancellor for academic planning and a.s.sessment, University of Texas; Myra Burnett, vice provost and a.s.sociate professor of psychology, Spelman College; William (Bill) Trent, professor of educational policy studies, University of Illinois; and Meredith Phillips, a.s.sociate professor of public policy and sociology, University of California at Los Angeles. The ma.n.u.script also benefited from insightful comments and suggestions received during presentations in diverse settings including the SSRCas Learning in Higher Education conference, organized with the support of the National a.s.sociation of State University and Land Grant Colleges (Chicago, November 2008); the annual meeting of the American Educational Research a.s.sociation (San Diego, April 2009); the annual meeting of the American Sociological a.s.sociation (San Francisco, August 2009); the International Sociology a.s.sociationas Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (Florence, May 2008); New York Universityas Applied Psychology Colloquium; the University of Virginia Curry School of Educationas Risk and Prevention Speaker Series; the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, University of Notre Dame; the Department of Sociology at Memorial University, Canada; and the Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment Spotlight Workshop.

Critical comments and recommendations for the project were provided by some of our close colleagues including Joan Malczewski, Mitch.e.l.l Stevens, and Jonathan Zimmerman, as well as by students in the fall 2009 New York University doctoral seminar aEducational Research in the United States: Problems and Possibilities.a We are grateful to our colleagues and students, as well as to the anonymous reviewers at the University of Chicago Press, for their constructive feedback.

The Social Science Research Council program coordinators for this project were Kim Pereira and Jeannie Kim, who provided full-time management of the Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment longitudinal project study from fall 2007 to summer 2008 and from fall 2008 to summer 2010 respectively. Without their professional competence, dedication, and commitment, this research would not have been possible. Additional a.s.sistance was provided at the SSRC by Maria Diaz, Carmin Galts, Sujung Kang, Julie Kellogg, Abby Larson, Katherine Long, Jaclyn Rosamilia, and Nicky Stephenson. Melissa Velez served as a primary research a.s.sistant for the statistical a.n.a.lysis, and is coauthor of chapters 2 and 3 as well as the methodological appendix. Velezas statistical sophistication and sociological insights have been heavily drawn upon throughout this project. Research a.s.sistance was also provided by Daniel Potter, who coauth.o.r.ed chapters 2 and 4, and Jeannie Kim, who coauth.o.r.ed chapter 3. Potter and Kim made both technical and substantive contributions to the chapters they coauth.o.r.ed.

Dedicated staff at the University of Chicago Press skillfully led this book through the final revisions and publication process. We are particularly indebted to Elizabeth Branch Dyson for her feedback and guidance; her enthusiasm and belief in the importance of this project propelled us through the final months of writing. We would also like to thank Anne Summers Goldberg for her technical a.s.sistance and Renaldo Migaldi for his meticulous editorial work.

Finally, we would like to express our deepest personal grat.i.tude to those who have lived with us and nourished us throughout this project. Shenandoah, best friend and confidant, provided much needed balance and a sense of humor along the way. Joan served as a personal and professional companion. Sydney, Eero, Luke, and Zora, through their dedication to their own schooling and their commitment to inhabit these colleges and universities in the future, served as inspirations.

While this research would not have been possible without the contributions from the individuals and inst.i.tutions identified above, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa are fully responsible for all findings presented, claims made, and opinions expressed in this book.

1.

College Cultures and Student Learning.

aColleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should,a the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, recently lamented. Many students graduate college today, according to Bok, awithout being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers a reason clearly or perform competently in a.n.a.lyzing complex, nontechnical problems.a1 While concern over undergraduate learning in this country has longstanding roots, in recent years increased attention has been focused on this issue not only by former Ivy League presidents, but also by policy makers, pract.i.tioners, and the public. Stakeholders in the higher education system have increasingly come to raise questions about the state of collegiate learning for a diverse set of reasons. Legislatorsa"and privately, middle-cla.s.s parents as wella"increasingly have expressed worry over the value and returns to their investments in higher education. Business leaders have begun to ask whether graduates have acquired the necessary skills to ensure economic compet.i.tiveness. And increasingly, educators within the system itself have begun to raise their voices questioning whether organizational changes to colleges and universities in recent decades have undermined the core educational functions of these inst.i.tutions.

These diverse concerns about the state of undergraduate education have served to draw attention to measuring whether students are actually developing the capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning at college. In a rapidly changing economy and society, there is widespread agreement that these individual capacities are the foundation for effective democratic citizens.h.i.+p and economic productivity. aWith all the controversy over the college curriculum,a Derek Bok has commented, ait is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the princ.i.p.al aim of undergraduate education.a2 Inst.i.tutional mission statements also echo this widespread commitment to developing studentsa critical thinking. They typically include a pledge, for example, that schools will work to challenge students to athink critically and intuitively,a and to ensure that graduates will become adept at acritical, a.n.a.lytical, and logical thinking.a These mission statements align with the idea that educational inst.i.tutions serve to enhance studentsa human capitala"knowledge, skills, and capacities that will be rewarded in the labor market. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, for example, have recently argued that increased investment in U.S. higher education attainment is required for both economic growth and reduced economic inequality. Goldin and Katzas recommendations rest on the a.s.sumption that increased college graduation rates will likely have such desirable economic outcomes because the labor market values athe highly a.n.a.lytical individual who can think abstractly.a3 But what if increased educational attainment is not equivalent to enhanced individual capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning?

While there has been a dearth of systematic longitudinal research on the topic, there are ample reasons to worry about the state of undergraduate learning in higher education. Policy makers and pract.i.tioners have increasingly become apprehensive about undergraduate education as there is growing evidence that individual and inst.i.tutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate academic learning per se. While as social scientists we want to avoid the pitfalls of either propagating historically inaccurate sentimental accounts of a romantic collegiate past followed by a tragic afall from gracea or, alternatively, scapegoating students, faculty, and colleges for the current state of affairs, it is imperative to provide a brief description of the historical, social, and inst.i.tutional context in which the phenomenon under investigation manifests itself to illuminate its multifaceted dimensions.

Higher Education Context: Continuity and Change Historians have noted that from the inception of U.S. colleges, many students often embraced a collegiate culture that had little to do with academic learning. While some students who used colleges to prepare for the ministry aavoided the hedonism and violence of their rowdy cla.s.smatesa and focused on academic pursuits rather than extracurricular activities, the majority of students chose another path. For many students in past decades, college was a time when one aforged a peer consciousness sharply at odds with that of the faculty and of serious students.a Undergraduates as a whole historically embraced a college lifea"complete with fraternities, clubs, and social activitiesa"that was produced, shaped, and defined by a peer culture oriented to nonacademic endeavors.4 Sociologists have long cautioned about the detrimental effects of peer cultures on an individualas commitment to academic pursuits in general and student learning in particular.5 Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, buta"more troubling stilla"they enter college with att.i.tudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment. In recent cohorts of students, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have described the prevalence of adrifting dreamersa with ahigh ambitions, but no clear life plans for reaching them.a These students ahave limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demand for these occupations.a6 They enter college, we believe, largely academically adrift.

While prior historical scholars.h.i.+p reminds us that U.S. undergraduates have long been devoted to pursuing social interests at college, there is emerging empirical evidence that suggests that college studentsa academic effort has dramatically declined in recent decades. Labor economists Philip Babc.o.c.k and Mindy Marks, for example, have recently conducted critically important empirical work that meticulously examines data from twelve individual-level surveys of student time use from the 1920s to today. They have found that full-time college students through the early 1960s spent roughly forty hours per week on academic pursuits (i.e., combined studying and cla.s.s time); at which point a steady decline ensued throughout the following decades. Today, full-time college students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activitiesa"that is, less time than a typical high school student spends at school. Average time studying fell from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 to twenty hours per week in 1981 and thirteen hours per week in 2003. The trends are even more p.r.o.nounced when Babc.o.c.k and Marks identify the percentage of students who report studying more than twenty hours per week: in 1961, 67 percent of full-time college students reported this level of effort; by 1981, the percentage had dropped to 44 percent; today, only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying. Babc.o.c.k and Marks carefully explored the extent to which changes in student effort simply reflect the fact that different types of individuals currently attend college and course taking patterns have changed. They found that such compositional explanations were inadequate: aStudy time fell for students from all demographic subgroups, within race, gender, ability and family background, overall and within major, for students who worked in college and for those who did not, and at four-year colleges of every type, size, degree structure and level of selectivity.a7 Studentsa lack of academic focus at todayas colleges, however, has had little impact on their grade point averages and often only relatively modest effects on their progress towards degree completion as they have developed and acquired athe art of college management,a in which success is achieved primarily not through hard work but through acontrolling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload.a8 Biostatistician Valen Johnson has taken advantage of unique data from Duke University on student course evaluations, grades, and enrollment decisions to demonstrate that students apreferentially enroll in cla.s.ses (and subject areas) with instructors who grade leniently.a9 For example, an undergraduate in Mary Grigsbyas recent study of collegiate culture at a Midwestern public university commented: I hate cla.s.ses with a lot of reading that is tested on. Any cla.s.s where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or something like that is better. Something that I can study and just learn from in five [minutes] Iall usually do pretty good in. Whereas, if Iam expected to read, you know, a hundred-and-fifty-page book and then write a three-page essay on it, you know, on a test letas say, Iall probably do worse on that test because I probably wouldnat have read the book. Maybe ask the kids, whatas in this book? And I can draw my own conclusions, but I rarely actually do reading a.s.signments or stuff like that, which is a mistake Iam sure, but it saves me a lot of time.

Grigsbyas student not only saved a great deal of time with his approach to cla.s.sesa"hours that could be reapportioned to leisure pursuitsa"but also was able to do well by conventional standards of his grade point average and progress towards degree. The student observed: aYou know I can get out of here with a 3.5 but it doesnat really matter if I donat remember anything a . Itas one thing to get the grade in a cla.s.s and itas another to actually take something from it, you know.a10 Studentsa ability to navigate academic course requirements with such modest levels of individual investment and cognitive effort points to a second set of social actors responsible for growing concern over undergraduate learning on todayas campuses: the college professoriate. If one is to cast aspersions on student cultures that exist on college campuses today, one would do well to focus equal attention on the faculty cultures and orientations that have flourished in U.S. higher education. Learning at college, after all, is an activity that ideally emerges from an interaction between faculty and students. aWhat students and teachers mean by atakinga and ateachinga courses is determined not by subject or levels alone, but also by the intentions of the partic.i.p.ants,a Arthur Powell and his colleagues observed two decades ago about U.S. high schools. In these settings, formal and informal atreatiesa often emerged: where teaching was aperceived as an art of capturing audiences and entertaining them,a and teachers and students aarrange deals or treaties that promote mutual goals or that keep the peace.a11 Higher education researcher George Kuh has extended this insight to colleges and universities, arguing that a adisengagement compacta has been struck on many contemporary campuses between faculty and students. This compact is described by Kuh as aIall leave you alone if you leave me alone.a That is, I wonat make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I wonat have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent gradesa"Bas and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learninga"on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources inst.i.tutions provide.12 If students are able to receive high marks and make steady progress towards their college degrees with such limited academic effort, must not faculty bare some responsibility for the low standards that exist in these settings?

When discussing the extent to which faculty are implicated in condoning and accommodating low levels of student commitment to academic coursework, it is important to acknowledge how varied faculty work lives are given the differentiated structure of U.S. higher education. In many lower-tier public colleges and universities that in recent years have faced growing resource constraints, traditional forms of faculty direct instruction have themselves been undermined by the replacement of full-time tenure track faculty with adjunct, graduate student, and other alternative forms of instruction. Recent government reports indicate that the percentage of full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting inst.i.tutions declined from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent by 2005.13 The changes in lower-tiered public inst.i.tutions have often been even more p.r.o.nounced. Full-time faculty in resource-poor inst.i.tutions likely feel increasingly overwhelmed and demoralized by the growing inst.i.tutional demands placed on them and their inability to identify sufficient resources to maintain traditional levels of support for undergraduate education.

In other settings where the costs of higher education have increased at roughly twice the rate of inflation for several decades and resources are therefore less constrained, faculty are nevertheless often distracted by inst.i.tutional demands and individual incentives to devote increased attention to research productivity. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, for example, astutely noted four decades ago that alarge numbers of Ph.D.s now regard themselves almost as independent professionals like doctors or lawyers, responsible primarily to themselves and their colleagues rather than their employers, and committed to the advancement of knowledge rather than of any particular inst.i.tutions.a14 Throughout the higher education system, faculty are increasingly expected to focus on producing scholars.h.i.+p rather than simply concentrating on teaching and inst.i.tutional service. This faculty orientation is deep-seated, as graduate training programs that prepare the next generation of faculty are housed primarily at research universities and offer little focus or guidance on developing instructional skills. As Derek Bok observed, ain the eyes of most faculty members in research universities, teaching is an art that is either too simple to require formal preparation, too personal to be taught to others, or too innate to be conveyed to anyone lacking the necessary gift.a15 Ernest Boyeras work in the late 1980s highlighted the changing apriorities of the professoriatea as well as the inst.i.tutional diffusion of the university research model to faculty at inst.i.tutions throughout the system. Boyer noted that while 21 percent of faculty in 1969 strongly agreed with the statement that ain my department it is difficult for a person to achieve tenure if he or she does not publish,a two decades later the percentage of faculty agreeing with that statement had doubled to 42 percent.16 By 1989, faculty at four-year colleges overwhelmingly reported that scholars.h.i.+p was more important than teaching for tenure decisions in their departments. For example, in terms of the significance of teaching related a.s.sessments for tenure, only 13 percent of faculty at four-year colleges reported cla.s.sroom observations as very important, 5 percent reported course syllabi as very important, 5 percent reported academic advis.e.m.e.nt as very important, and 9 percent reported student recommendations as very important. Interestingly, the only form of instructional a.s.sessment that more than one in eight faculty considered as critical for tenure was student course evaluations: 25 percent of four-year college faculty reported these instruments as very important for tenure decisions. To the extent that teaching mattered in tenure decisions at all, student satisfaction with courses was the primary measure that faculty considered relevant: a measure that partially encourages individual faculty to game the system by replacing rigorous and demanding cla.s.sroom instruction with entertaining cla.s.sroom activities, lower academic standards, and a generous distribution of high course marks. Research on course evaluations by Valen Johnson has convincingly demonstrated that ahigher grades do lead to better course evaluationsa and astudent course evaluations are not very good indicators of how much students have learned.a17 Faculty also reported in Boyeras study that inst.i.tutional service within the university community was relatively inconsequential for tenure decisions: only 11 percent of faculty at four-year colleges reported this factor as being very important. While faculty widely reported that teaching and university service were generally not very important for tenure, 41 percent reported the number of publications as very important, 28 percent reported the reputation of the presses and journals publis.h.i.+ng the books or articles as very important, 28 percent reported research grants as very important, and 29 percent reported recommendations from outside scholars (which are primarily based on evaluation of faculty membersa published research records) as very important. The significance of external recommendations can be contrasted with recommendations from other faculty within the inst.i.tution, which only 18 percent of four-year college faculty considered as very important.18 For Boyer, what was particularly troubling about these findings was the fact that this faculty orientation had spread widely beyond the research university to a much larger set of otherwise inst.i.tutionally diverse four-year colleges. Boyer worried that at many college campuses, athe focus had moved from the student to the professoriate, from general to specialized education, and from loyalty to the campus to loyalty to the profession.a19 While some have argued, and indeed it is possible, that faculty research and teaching can be complementary, the empirical evidence unfortunately suggests that this tends not to be the case on most of todayas campuses. In What Matters in College? Alexander Astin constructed two scales: one of the facultyas research orientation (defined primarily in terms of publication rate, time spent on research, and personal commitment to research and scholars.h.i.+p) and one of the facultyas student orientation (reflecting primarily the extent to which faculty believed that their colleagues were interested in and focused on student development). The two scales were strongly negatively correlated, and ironically, if not surprisingly, the facultyas student orientation was negatively related to salary compensation.20 After examining a range of student outcomes from academic to affective, Astin concluded that athere is a significant inst.i.tutional price to be paid, in terms of student development, for a very strong faculty emphasis on research.a21 By the turn of the century, however, incentives for faculty throughout the four-year college system increasingly had come to emphasize and encourage professors to focus on pursuing their own scholars.h.i.+p and professional research interests. While recent faculty time-use studies have shown only modest changes in time devoted to research, teaching, and advis.e.m.e.nt (with the former two categories showing slight increases between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, and the latter category moderately declining), the time-use data does show that four-year college professors spend only limited time on preparing instruction, teaching cla.s.ses, and advising students. On average, faculty spend approximately eleven hours per week on advis.e.m.e.nt and instructional preparation and delivery. The time-use data also indicates that faculty report directly engaging in research activities only from two hours per week in liberal arts colleges to five hours per week at research universities.22 The remainder of time during a typical academic work week is consumed with a host of other professional and quasi-administrative functions including committee meetings, e-mail correspondence, review of professional ma.n.u.scripts, and external consulting.

While some of these additional noninstructional obligations are mandated by the inst.i.tutions that employ facultya"as in the university and department committee meetings that professors often complain abouta" many of these additional activities likely advance faculty careers, but are largely unrelated or only indirectly related to undergraduate instruction. Ma.s.sy and Zemsky have referred to the process whereby faculty gain increased discretionary time to pursue professional and personal goals, while undergraduate education is devalued, as an aacademic ratchet.a Ma.s.sy and Zemsky note: Put simply, those hours not used for teaching courses, for grading papers, or for meeting with students become available for research and scholars.h.i.+p, for consulting and other professional activities, and in most research universities, for specialized teaching at the graduate level. Inst.i.tutional rhetoric about the importance of teaching notwithstanding, we believe that the reductions in discretionary time a.s.sociated with more and better teaching usually are not compensated by additional salary or other rewards, whereas success or failure with regard to other obligations carries significant rewards and penalties a Even when most faculty use their time to meet professional and inst.i.tutional obligations, the academic ratchet still s.h.i.+fts output from undergraduate education toward research, scholars.h.i.+p, professional service, and similar activitiesa"a process that we have termed aoutput creep.a23 Christopher Jencks and David Riesman several decades earlier provided a similar account of faculty movement away from undergraduate instruction at research universities in The Academic Revolution. They noted that the availability of external funding gave successful researchers significant leverage over the colleges and universities that employed them: Since the amount of research support has grown much faster than the number of competent researchers, talented men have been in very short supply and command rapidly rising salaries. They are also increasingly free to set their own working conditions. The result has been a rapid decline in teaching loads for productive scholars, an increase in the ratio of graduate to undergraduate students at the inst.i.tutions where scholars are concentrated, the gradual elimination of unscholarly undergraduates from these inst.i.tutions, and the parallel elimination of unscholarly faculty.24 In recent decades the allure of external funding for research has been greatly enhanced by the growth of commercial opportunities a.s.sociated with research activities in higher education. Federal government legislation, such as the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, allowed colleges and universities to patent discoveries that had been developed with federal research support and facilitated the growth of university collaborations awith the private sector in the development of the commercialization of new technologies.a25 Colleges and universitiesa"inst.i.tutions that, according to Derek Bok, share with compulsive gamblers the trait that athere is never enough money to satisfy their desiresaa"eagerly embraced these new opportunities to acquire new sources of funding.26 Universities also engaged in these emerging corporate ventures to acquire the symbolic resources that the collaborations conferred. Sociologists Walter Powell and Jason Owen-Smith have astutely observed that athe commercialization of university-based knowledge signals the universityas role as a driver of the economy. Such a lofty status has much more legitimacy and cachet, and makes it possible for universities, especially public universities, to boast their success in creating employment opportunities.a27 Whether one focuses on aoutput creepa occurring as a result of an aacademic ratcheta that individual faculty engage in to expand their professional discretionary time, on the aacademic revolutiona produced by the expanding power of the faculty researcher that Christopher Jencks and David Riesman described in the late 1960s, or on the acommercialization of higher educationa following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that Walter Powell and Jason Owen-Smith examined, one thing is clear: undergraduate education in many colleges and universities is only a limited component of a much broader set of faculty professional interests, and one that generally is not perceived as being significantly rewarded. And if there is any doubt that college professors are less likely than other individuals to focus on material incentives, recent surveys of students and faculty have found that faculty are more likely than students to report that being well off financially is an essential or a very important goal to them.28 We do not believe, however, that financial incentives are primarily responsible for faculty commitment to research. Rather, we believe that given the transformation of higher education, one of the few remaining moral bases for academic life is a quasi-religious commitment to embracing research as a avocational calling.a As Anthony Kronman recently observed, athe equation of scholarly specialization with duty and honor a makes the development of oneas place in the division of intellectual labor a spiritually meaningful goal and not just an economic or organizational necessity.a29 For many faculty, commitment to their own individual research programs is thus understood not as an act of self-aggrandizement or personal selfishness, but rather as a moral imperative that one must pursue and struggle to achieve regardless of inst.i.tutional obstacles.

While faculty distracted by professional interests other than undergraduate instruction share responsibility for the current state of undergraduate learning occurring on U.S. campuses, it is worth emphasizing again that the professoriate respond to incentives established not only by their larger professional fields of scholars.h.i.+p, but also more specifically by higher-education inst.i.tutions and the administrators who oversee the colleges and universities where they are employed. While many U.S. colleges follow governance policies that cede formal control over curriculum and instruction to the faculty as a whole, administrators have the inst.i.tutional authority and responsibility to determine work loads and ensure that faculty are spending sufficient effort on undergraduate instruction as opposed to other legitimate professional activities (e.g., graduate instruction, academic scholars.h.i.+p, and professional service).

If faculty at U.S. colleges can be described as being distracted by professional interests other than undergraduate instruction, it is likely even more the case that contemporary higher education administrators experience inst.i.tutional interests and incentives that focus their attention elsewhere. As former Harvard University President Derek Bok has noted: While (academic) leaders have considerable leverage and influence of their own, they are often reluctant to employ these a.s.sets for fear of arousing opposition from the faculty that could attract unfavorable publicity, worry potential donors, and even threaten their jobs. After all, success in increasing student learning is seldom rewarded, and its benefits are usually hard to demonstrate, far more so than success in lifting the SAT scores of the entering cla.s.s or in raising the money to build new laboratories or libraries.30 We believe that administrators are likely even more distracted than faculty from a focus on undergraduate instruction due to the simple fact that their professional lives (with the possible exception of administrators working in the area of student services) tend to reduce and limit their amount of interpersonal contact with students. After all, faculty on average spend eleven hours per week on teaching and advis.e.m.e.nt activities that to some extent must remind them of the significance of student learning.

One empirical way to highlight the extent to which administrators have allowed higher-education inst.i.tutions to drift away from an undergraduate instructional focus is to identify the staffing and employment changes that those inst.i.tutions have implemented in recent decades. While administrators at colleges and universities with strong traditions of faculty governance can legitimately claim that curriculum and instruction are appropriately considered faculty matters and not administrative responsibilities, decisions around employment structure and staffing are universally considered to be under the purview of administrators. In colleges and universities across the country, not only have part-time instructors increasingly replaced full-time professors, but resources have increasingly been diverted towards nonacademic functions. Sociologist Gary Rhoades has doc.u.mented that over the past three decades, athis group [of non-faculty support professionals] has become the fastest growing category of professional employment in higher education.a31 While some of these individuals have been hired for administrative functions such as human relations, accounting, and regulatory compliance, Rhoades has observed that the most significant increase has occurred in the broad area of student services including admissions, financial aid, career placement, counseling, and academic services such as advising and tutoring that have been rea.s.signed to non-faculty professionals. These amanagerial professionals,a as Rhoades has termed them, have come to comprise anearly 30 percent of the professional positions on campus and more than three times the number of administrative positions.a In related changes, the percentage of professional employees in higher education comprised of faculty has decreased from approximately two-thirds in 1970 to 53 percent by 2000.32 This internal transformation of higher education, while often focused on elevating student services as broadly defined, has implicitly deemphasized the role of faculty and faculty instruction per se at these inst.i.tutions. The nonacademic professionalization of higher education can also be observed in appointments to college and university leaders.h.i.+p positions, as well as their compensation packages. While the vast majority of higher-education leaders continue to emerge from earlier positions in the college professoriate, in recent decades individuals increasingly have been drawn from nonacademic backgrounds and hired through a process dependent on professional search consultants. About one in seven college and university presidents now comes from outside academia; the role of external professional search consultants in the selection process has grown from 12 percent in 1984 to more than half today.33 In addition, administrative positions in higher education have become increasingly well compensated.34 On average, college and university presidentsa compensation in the private sector is approximately $500,000, with many making over a million dollars per year. aWhen you have college presidents making $1 million, youare going to have $800,000 provosts and $500,000 deans,a Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has noted. aIt reflects a set of values that is not the way most Americans think of higher education.a35 While there is nothing inherently wrong with well-paid higher education administrative personnel, the nonacademic professionalization of higher education leaders.h.i.+p, and the process whereby it is identified, our concern here is simply about how these changes might affect inst.i.tutional attention to academic instruction. As the sociologist Steven Brint has noted, awe know that the backgrounds of top executives can influence the climate of the firms they lead a If this is true in corporations, is it not likely to be true a fortiori in colleges and universities?a36 Arguably, s.h.i.+fts in the character of administrative leaders.h.i.+p are a.s.sociated with the phenomenon of colleges and universities today becoming much more interested in the fulfillment of nonacademic services and functions, while focusing less on traditional academic instruction.

Indeed, as sociologist Mitch.e.l.l Stevens noted in his recent ethnography of a selective private residential college: aThe College is an academic inst.i.tution, and a justly proud one, but it also is proud of its twenty-eight varsity sports teams, its budding artists and musicians, its community service projects, diverse student body, spectacular campus, and loyal alumni.a37 Colleges and universities have secured their centrality in our society not only by providing credentials that aserve as ever more important cues about worker capability and character,a but also by amaking college life more athletic, more masculine, and more fun.a38 Colleges and universities are not just asievesa that sort and train students, but also aincubators,a atemples,a and ahubsaa"i.e., settings for the development of cultural dispositions, network formation, knowledge production, and inst.i.tutional relations.h.i.+ps.39 Changes in Inst.i.tutional Functions and Ident.i.ties.

Traditionally, U.S. colleges and universities had embraced both academic and moral education as primary inst.i.tutional functions and rationales. While Harvard historian Julie Reuben has shown how colleges and universities over time s.h.i.+fted the approach whereby moral education was inculcated in studentsa"with athe religious stage, falling roughly between 1880 and 1910; the scientific, from about 1900 to 1920; and the humanistic and extracurricular, roughly 1915a"1930aa"these inst.i.tutions defined their organizational missions in large part by embracing the responsibility of providing academic and moral guidance to young adults in their charge.40 Following World War II, however, colleges and universities that were enrolling increasing numbers of students turned away from these functions and embraced more narrowly defined technocratic ends, such as the generation of scientific knowledge and the production of graduates to fill professional and managerial positions. Some observers have largely celebrated these organizational changes. For example, Clark Kerr, former chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, observed that in these transformed inst.i.tutions athere is less sense of purposea but athere are more ways to excel. There are also more refuges of anonymitya"both for the creative person and the drifter.a41 Other scholars, however, have lamented this transformation, worrying that U.S. higher education does not have aan adequate basis for establis.h.i.+ng a consensus of moral valuesaa"other than support for adiversity and mutual toleranceaa"and thus is ain the midst of a moral crisis.a42 Since the student rebellions of the 1960s, the extent to which collegiate life has embraced nonacademic pursuits has likely been aided and abetted by college administrators and staff who have alargely withdrawn from oversight of manners and morals.a43 While colleges once a.s.sumed a quasi-parental role and struggled with mixed success to ensure athe enforcement of academic and social rules,a educators and administrators have grown aless certain than they once were as to what students ought to be or become, and are reluctant to go to the mat with the young for principles in which they themselves only half believe.a Even if a consensus was reached on the definition of an appropriate and desirable code of student conduct, college administrators and faculty have often found it apolitically expedient to avoid collective regulation of student behavior.a44 Although administrators in recent years on some college campuses have implemented policies to limit and control alcohol and drug use, in most secular colleges there has been little inst.i.tutional responsibility taken for the moral development or social regulation of students. It is thus not particularly surprising that behaviors at odds with academic values, such as cheating on exams, have been demonstrated to have increased significantly in recent decades. In a longitudinal comparison of nine colleges, for example, college students who admitted that they copied from other students on tests or exams increased from 26 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1993. Rates of student cheating were particularly high in colleges that had no honor code governing student conduct.45 These developments are not unique to higher education; they have occurred concurrent with broad-based cultural changes in the relations.h.i.+p between youth and education. They occurred, for example, during an historic period where elementary and secondary students had begun to enjoy a wide range of new legal rights and ent.i.tlements that undermined studentsa sense of traditional forms of authority relations.h.i.+ps in education.46 Concurrently, legally mandated supplementary student services in special education programs increased dramatically, redefining earlier a.s.sumptions of individual and inst.i.tutional responsibility for managing studentsa academic and social difficulties. Middle-cla.s.s parents increasingly saw themselves less as collaborative partners with school authorities who were believed to possess legitimate authority in loco parentis and more as aadvocatesa for their childrenas educational needs. Educators became progressively more reluctant to require students to master certain forms of knowledge over other less culturally privileged ones. Students in Ka"12, and particularly in higher education, increasingly became defined as aconsumersa and aclients.a In this context, schools are expected not to provide quasi-parental guidance and social regulation, but instead to meet client needs through delivery of elaborate and ever-expanding services.

The effects of these broad-based cultural changes on higher education were enhanced by federal and state policies that s.h.i.+fted financial support from inst.i.tutions to individuals. As higher-education researchers Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie have doc.u.mented, in the early 1970s the federal government began formulating internal policy papers calling for aa freer play of market forcesa that would agive individuals the general power of choice in the education marketplacea as well as specifying alevels and types of student support which will make most inst.i.tutional aid programs unnecessary.a47 At the federal and state level, inst.i.tutional aid programs were increasingly replaced by ahigh tuitiona"high aid policy through which government gave aid to students rather than inst.i.tutions, thus making student consumers in the tertiary marketplace. Inst.i.tutions competed with each other to attract students and their Pell grants.a48 Student aid was essentially structured as an educational voucher. While the G.I. Bill of 1944 provided portable scholars.h.i.+p support for veterans to use at accredited inst.i.tutions, the higher-education reauthorization legislation pa.s.sed in 1972 provided portable financial aid to large numbers of students who were defined as qualified based on income levels. In recent years, this market-based logic has only been further extended by federal policies that have facilitated the growth of college finance models that rely on tax credits and student loans.49 Personal financial investment in higher education has significantly grown with increases in the cost of higher education and an expanded reliance on private credit-based financing. Specifically, from 1978 to 2008, tuition and fees (not including room and board) increased from $9,903 to $25,143 in private four-year colleges and from $2,303 to $6,585 in public four-year colleges in constant 2008 dollars.50 Family and student sources of financing also s.h.i.+fted, with the fastest-growing source of funding being private-sector loans. From 1997 to 2007, private-sector student loans in constant dollars increased almost seven times, from $2.5 billion to $17.6 billion.51 Approximately 60 percent of students graduating four-year colleges have taken out student loans; from 2000 to 2007 the average student-loan debt per borrower increased 18 percent, from $19,300 to $22,700 in constant 2007 dollars.52 In addition to student-loan debts, students during this period also increasingly used credit cards to support themselves and their educational expenses while in college. Undergraduates in their senior year in 2008 on average had $4,100 in credit card debt, with one-fifth of seniors carrying credit card balances greater than $7,000. Moreover, 30 percent of students reported putting tuition costs on their credit cards.53 The a.s.sumption of significant debt during college became typical, as did the hours many students spent in paid employment while attempting to complete their degrees.

Social scientists are just beginning to explore the implications of this s.h.i.+ft for how students are understanding and experiencing their college years. The increased debt burden could potentially serve to impose a new sense of self-discipline on students, and a refocused attention on academic activities. Alternatively, it might lead students to become distracted from their coursework by the importance of paid employment, or it might produce other unantic.i.p.ated consequences. Full-time college students on average today spend five hours more per week working than in the early 1960s, although national data suggests that fewer than one in six full-time students at four-year colleges work more than twenty hours per week.54 In terms of increased debt, an intriguing recent study of students at one selective southern Californian inst.i.tution found that undergraduates had little worry about their ability to find high-paying jobs after college to repay their student loans. Students reported that they defined the purpose of these loans as serving not just as an investment in the future but also as a means to experience fully a collegiate lifea"a personal objective that included a commitment to a student culture characterized by frequent socializing, travel, and entertainment.55 Regardless of how rising costs and increased reliance on loans affect student academic and social behavior, changes in the character of higher-education financing are potentially related to the deepening of consumerist orientations within higher education.

A market-based logic of education encourages students to focus on its instrumental valuea"that is, as a credentiala"and to ignore its academic meaning and moral character. The historical sociologist David Labaree has argued that awe have credentialism to thank for aversion to learning that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational system.a56 Many studentsa lack of commitment to substantive academic learning is consistent with their definition of the situation: aIt is only rational for students to try to acquire the greatest exchange value for the smallest investment of time and energy.a57 Faculty also do not have much incentive to challenge this emerging reward structure, as conflicts with students over these matters potentially can distract from research, lower teacher or course evaluations, and generate administrative problems a.s.sociated with student resistance.

Private colleges and universities, of course have always to some extent adopted market-based orientations and competed for studentsa"just as students have competed for access to elite private education. In recent decades, however, as the market-based logic of higher education has been extended, public colleges and universities have begun to share more in common with their counterparts in the private sector. There are likely many positive consequences a.s.sociated with defining students as consumers and clients as schools become more responsive to articulated individual student needs. Our point here, however, is that there is no guarantee that students will prioritize academic learning at the core of their inst.i.tutional demands. There are many reasons instead to expect students as consumers to focus on receiving services that will allow them, as effortlessly and comfortably as possible, to attain valuable educational credentials that can be exchanged for later labor market success. As historical sociologist David Labaree has noted: The payoff for a particular credential is the same no matter how it was acquired, so it is rational behavior to try to strike a good bargain, to work at getting a diploma, like a car, at a substantial discount. The effect on education is to emphasize form over contenta"to promote an educational system that is willing to reward students for formal compliance with modest performance requirements rather than for demonstrating operational mastery of skills deemed politically and socially useful.58 While colleges and universities have always in part been businesses that have competed to attract students and cater to their individual needs, they also have traditionally seen themselves as enterprises with quasi-parental authority and the responsibility to define appropriate educational goals with regard to academic content, social behavior, and moral development. The balance between these competing inst.i.tutional functions has noticeably s.h.i.+fted in recent decades.

Measuring Learning in Higher Education.

Organizational inertia, the a.s.sumption that students are meeting the academic goals espoused in mission statements, and a lack of external pressure to demonstrate learning have all contributed to a failure systematically to measure and evaluate studentsa gains in higher education. The tide is s.h.i.+fting, however, as concerns about turning out productive workers and not wasting resources become paramount in an era of globalization and fiscal constraints. Learning in higher education was recently placed in the national spotlight by a report of the Secretary of Educationas Commission on the Future of Higher Education ent.i.tled A Test of Leaders.h.i.+p. Reminiscent of the critique in A Nation at Risk of elementary and secondary education in the 1980s, A Test of Leaders.h.i.+p placed the responsibility for the nationas compet.i.tiveness in the global economy on the doorsteps of educational inst.i.tutions. With respect to student performance, the commission noted that athe quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate, and in some cases, declining.a59 Supporting this claim, it reported on sobering statistics from the National a.s.sessment of Adult Literacy. Specifically, from 1992 to 2003 the percentage of college graduates judged proficient by various literacy measures was relatively low, and by two of those three indicators competency declined (prose, 40 to 31 percent; doc.u.ment, 37 to 25 percent; and quant.i.tative, 31 percent at both time points).60 While a debate has since ensued on the definition of proficiency, the commission nevertheless used the results from this study to urge improvement and increased accountability to monitor student learning in higher education.61 The commission also identified a lack of transparency and accountability with respect to inst.i.tutional performance in general and student learning in particular. aDespite increased attention to student learning results by colleges and universities and accreditation agencies, parents and students have no solid evidence, comparable across inst.i.tutions, of how much students learn in colleges or whether they learn more at one college than another,a its report noted. aSimilarly, policymakers need more comprehensive data to help them decide whether the national investment in higher education is paying off and how taxpayer dollars could be used more effectively.a62 From our standpoint, the evidence of student and organizational culturesa inattention to learning and high levels of societal investment makes discussion of higher educationas accountability both largely inevitable and in certain respects warranted. We are deeply skeptical, however, that externally imposed accountability systems will yield desirable changes in educational practicesa"for reasons that we will discuss in the concluding chapter of this book. More immediately, as social scientists we raise two additional core reservations regarding such endeavors. First, it is not clear that the state of knowledge in the field is adequate to the task. Specifically, as we will discuss in detail below, there is only a very limited tradition of social scientific efforts to measure learning rigorously across individuals and inst.i.tutions in higher education, and even less of a scholarly research corpus that attempts to identify individual and inst.i.tutional factors a.s.sociated with improved postsecondary student performance. Given these limitations, it is doubtful that the implementation of an externally imposed accountability system would yield outcomes that would be either meaningful or productive.

Second, while the question of how much students in particular colleges are learninga"or, whether they are learning anything a.s.sociated with academic knowledge at alla"is worth pondering at a societal and regulatory level, in terms of applied social science research designed to improve inst.i.tutional policy and practice, it is the wrong question. Rather than asking whether students are learning anything at college and designing accountability regimes to address the absence of measurable gains at underperforming schools, we need first to identify the specific factors a.s.sociated with variation in student learning across and within inst.i.tutions. Such an empirical a.n.a.lysis requires that large numbers of students in multiple inst.i.tutions are tracked over time as they progress through college. Longitudinal measurement of test score performance, coursework, inst.i.tutional characteristics, social background, and college experience is needed to build our knowledge of the processes and mechanisms a.s.sociated with student learning. Datasets of this character in elementary and secondary education have existed for several decades and have enabled researchers to address these questions adequately.

To date, however, longitudinal datasets with these features have not existed in the field of U.S. higher education. As social scientists we were tired of waiting on the U.S. government to muster the political will to overcome inst.i.tutional resistance and begin collecting longitudinal data tracking student learning in higher education over time. Our frustration was so great that when an opportunity arose to join a group of innovative pract.i.tioners to collect independent data on this topic, we began building our own dataset that could for the first time systematically identify the relevant individual and inst.i.tutional factors a.s.sociated with student learning in higher education. Our research addresses the critical absence of similar studies by tracking students through a large and representative sample of higher-education inst.i.tutions with objective measures of their learning as well as of their coursework, social background, and experience of life on todayas college campuses.

The Determinants of College Learning Dataset.

Our research was made possible by a collaborative partners.h.i.+p with the Council for Aid to Education,63 an organization that brought together leading national psychometricians at the end of the twentieth century to develop a state-of-the-art a.s.sessment instrument to measure undergraduate learning, and twenty-four four-year colleges and universities that granted us access to students who were scheduled to take the Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment (CLA) in their first semester (Fall 2005) and at the end of their soph.o.m.ore year (Spring 2007).64 Students who consented to partic.i.p.ate in our study not only completed the CLA at multiple points in their college careers, but also responded to surveys on their social and educational backgrounds and experiences. In addition, we collected course transcript data and inst.i.tutional information on high schools and colleges that the students attended. The research in this book is based on longitudinal data of 2,322 students enrolled across a diverse range of campuses. Colleges in our sample include schools of varying size, selectivity, and missions. The sample includes liberal arts colleges and large research inst.i.tutions, as well as a number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving inst.i.tutions (HSIs). The schools are dispersed nationally across all four regions of the country. We refer to this multifaceted data as the Determinants of College Learning (DCL) dataset.

Logistical and resource constraints required our reliance on partic.i.p.ating inst.i.tutions to implement appropriate random sampling and retention strategies. We thoroughly investigated the extent to which students in our sample were indeed representative of students from these inst.i.tutions as well as of U.S. higher education more broadly (this bookas methodological appendix provides detailed comparisons with data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study). On most measures, students in the DCL dataset appeared reasonably representative of traditional-age undergraduates in four-year inst.i.tutions, and the colleges and universities they attended resembled four-year inst.i.tutions nationwide. The DCL studentsa racial, ethnic, and family backgrounds as well as their English-language backgrounds and high school grades also tracked well with national statistics. For example, 65 percent of DCL students had college-educated parents, as compared to 59 percent of a national sample of traditional-age students in four-year inst.i.tutions. Half of students in both the DCL and national samples earned A or Aa" in high school. Moreover, the four-year colleges and universities in the DCL sample have a proportion of white students and a level of academic preparation similar to those of four-year inst.i.tutions in general. Indeed, the 25th and 75th SAT percentiles of entering students at the DCL inst.i.tutions and four-year inst.i.tutions nationwide are virtually identical. As a likely result of the voluntary partic.i.p.ation required in our study, however, our sample did have fewer men, as well as fewer students of lower scholastic ability as measured by standardized testsa" for example, studentsa combined scores at the 25th percentile of the SAT were lower in our sample than at DCL inst.i.tutions or four-year inst.i.tutions nationwide. Consequently, we believe that any biases introduced into our a.n.a.lysis by the sampling procedures used are likely to be in the direction of leading us toward overestimating studentsa positive educational experiences and inst.i.tutional success.

The Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment.

The Collegiate Learning a.s.sessment (CLA) consists of three open-ended, as opposed to multiple-choice, a.s.sessment components: a performance task and two a.n.a.lytical writing tasks (i.e., to make an argument and to break an argument). According to its developers, the CLA was designed to a.s.sess acore outcomes espoused by all of higher educationa"critical thinking, a.n.a.lytical reasoning, problem solving and writing.a65 These general skills are athe broad competencies that are mentioned in college and university mission statements.a66 Rather than testing for specific content knowledge gained in particular courses or majors, the intent was to a.s.sess athe collective and c.u.mulative result of what takes place or does not take place over the four to six years of undergraduate education in and out of the cla.s.sroom.a67 The developers of the CLA argue that it a.s.sesses abilities distinct from those measured in general education tests such as the Scholastic Apt.i.tude Test (SAT) and the American College Testing (ACT) program. aConsequently, an SAT prep course would not help a student on the CLA and instruction aimed at improving CLA scores is unlikely to have much impact on SAT or ACT scores.a68 While the CLA as a whole is considered by some as state-of-the-art, the performance task component is its most well-developed and sophisticated part. Our a.n.a.lysis, which follows in this book, will focus on that component. The performance task allows students ninety minutes to respond to a writing prompt that is a.s.sociated with a set of background doc.u.ments. The testing materials, including the doc.u.ments, are accessed through a computer. The Council for Aid to Education has published several examples of representative performance tasks that are worth describing here in detail.

The aDynaTecha performance task asks students to generate a memo advising an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed. Students are informed: aYou are the a.s.sistant to Pat Williams, the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment. Sally Evans, a member of DynaTechas sales force, recommended that DynaTech buy a small private plane (a SwiftAir 235) that she and other members of the sales force could use to visit customers. Pat was about to approve the purchase when there was an accident involving a SwiftAir 235.a Students are provided with the following set of doc.u.ments for this activity: newspaper articles about the accident, a federal accident report on in-flight breakups in single engine planes, Pat Williamsas e-mail to her a.s.sistant and Sally Evansas e-mail to Pat Williams, charts on SwiftAiras performance characteristics, an article from Amateur Pilot magazine comparing SwiftAir 235 to similar planes, and pictures and descriptions of SwiftAir models 180 and 235. Students are then instructed to aprepare a memo that addresses several questions, including what data support or refute the claim that the type of wing on the SwiftAir 235 leads to more in-flight breakups, what other factors might have contributed to the accident and should be taken into account, and your overall recommendation about whether or not DynaTech should purchase the plane.a69 A second performance task that the Council for Aid to Education has circulated is related to crime reduction. The test instructs students that aJamie Eager is a candidate who is opposing Pat Stone for reelection. Eager critiques the mayoras solution to reducing crime by increasing the number of police officers. Eager proposes the city support a drug education program for