According to the recently published “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, college students have not been studying enough.
(Gasp!)
The book has caused uproar and dismay in the academic and educational world for the past month. In it, Arum and Roksa critique the standard of American undergraduates over the past four years.
In short, students are reading and writing less, performing worse and devoting less time to academic pursuits. Instead, they are focusing on other non-academic ones, like work or social life.
Jazz musician Frank Zappa summed up the problem quite nicely: “If you want to get laid, go to college; if you want an education, go to the library.”
According to Arum and Roksa, even graduates “are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master.”
This is a problem, they say, because “the attainment of long-term occupational success in the economy requires not only academic credentials, but very likely also academic skills.”
Making “academic credentials” so easily attainable is the fault of schools like ASU. For instance, professors often do not demand enough reading or writing of their students.
Commenting on “Academically Adrift” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, wrote, “When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them. When it comes to writing assignments in non-writing-oriented courses, students don’t like them to run too long and neither do teachers.”
Well, of course they don’t. Who would, when it could cost them positive student evaluations?
But students shoulder the blame for their failing skills, too.
We’ve all heard during registration: “Do you know any easy classes I could take?”
Yes –– but not that you should.
It is time to take responsibility for your own education and future, most importantly because the system probably won’t change anytime soon.
As “Adrift” notes, “Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis, because the institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek.”
Translation: You are an adult now, and nobody is going to force you to learn.
So unless you want a job that you were qualified for in high school, it’s time for a paradigm shift.
You don’t necessarily have to enjoy schoolwork in order to achieve satisfaction from it.
It’s sort of like working out — which I know many ASU students are familiar with: I see you at the SRC.
Now, just go home and bench-press that hippocampus.
Last Friday night I was walking back from the library to my dorm room with my backpack on. As I passed by a couple walking down the hallway, I heard one not so quietly whisper to the other, “nerd.”
All I could think as I entered my room was: Isn’t that the goal of being a student in college — or at least what it should be?
Yes, I am a nerd. And you should be, too.
Debate with Danny at djoconn1@asu.edu
