Flying to Boston for the Urban Sites Network Conference, I read Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Really insightful report. Though I’ll go over a few main ideas from the text below, it’s worth a look.

Some main takeaways:

1. Teachers and schools matter – Students’ critical thinking and general learning was improved by the rigor of teaching, the amount of interaction between faculty and students, and school climate.
2. Teaching isn’t valued by universities – Faculty workload and tenure review de-emphasize teaching. Adjunct, graduate students and lecturers teach more and more courses. In many graduate programs, teaching is not instilled in graduate students as something valued.
3. Students are opting for easier classes, spending less time studying and “taming” professors – Despite critical thinking being tied to a professor’s teaching track record, students are generally opting to take easier classes, not frequently interacting with professors, and generally pushing the rigor of courses down.
4. The K12 achievement gap continues throughout post-secondary education – Looking at students by race and class, students that come from socio-economically disadvantaged groups tend to more frequently take easier classes less frequently interact with professors, and show marginal growths in learning and critical thinking over time.

The implications of the study captured in the book are significant. However, in considering the need for a college degree in gaining entry into the competitive workforce, the study portrays a significant gateway American youth must pass through.

The study highlights the “college for all” mentality that is perceived throughout the country. At the same time it shows that not only are students less prepared for the rigors of college, they also expect to be able to achieve competitively despite a lack of academic focus in their secondary education. And, ultimately, these students (though there is a significant rate of students dropping out of college) complete degrees by navigating through easier courses; the statistics on the amount of students that never write compositions longer than 20 pages by the time they graduate is both significant and unsurprising in the context of the disembodied learning experiences that students are currently undergoing.

What’s not said, in the book, however, is just how necessary college is. Students are expecting to go through college–even when they are not motivated in high school–because, if they want a middle-class level job, they need a bachelor’s degree (at a minimum). Essentially, we are forcing students to go through a program they are not prepared for and may not be interested in, in order to get a job afterwards. On the other side of this are the thousands of students not represented in the study: the students that don’t even bother with college in the first place. In a school like Manual Arts, a school of black and Latino students, this is roughly 90% of our students … more than 3,000 of them. They aren’t playing the college game, they are not taming college professors, they are not not visiting professors during office hours, they are not spending too much time socializing in fraternities and sororities, and they are not worried about the debt that so often comes with entering the sphere of higher education.

I get that that is not the purpose of the book. Frankly, I found Academically Adrift compelling–the hard data that fills roughly a third of the book as an appendix is a valuable resource that will eventually guide a Socratic conversation with my high school students. I bring up the unspoken story of the students who aren’t entering the drift-free world of college because it brings up the further segmentation of American society. By the time students get to college, the achievement gap cleaves working class students well away from their counterparts and leaves them with few options (aside from the marginal small percentage of students that “make it” and perpetuate the cycle of inequality). By the time students finish college, they are further partitioned by race and class: many will not finish, a majority will finish with a bare minimum of engagement and negligible amounts of learning (less selective universities have looser general education requirements–students will usually take easier classes at these schools), and a small fraction of students will leave college with the kinds of higher order critical thinking skills that universities were established to instill. Our achievement gap essentially becomes a series of canyons of exacerbated inequality.