Study Finds That One out of Every Three College Graduates Didn't Learn Much in College

Do you ever wonder if all that money you spent sending your children to college is going to pay off? In these trying economic times, it’s often hard to tell as even those college grads with Ivy League degrees are finding the job market challenging to say the least. (Read consumer complaints about colleges).

Yet, despite soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year and you have to figure that a bachelor’s degree is now a minimum requirement for almost any job worth having. As a parent, we sacrifice whatever it takes to make sure our children have an opportunity benefit from at least a bachelor’s degree. Rarely, however, do we ask a fundamental question: Did they actually learn anything for all that time, work and money?

Now, a new study published this month by two professors addresses that exact question and they found that more than one third (36%) of all college graduates may not have learned enough during those four years of college to help them face the world with the cognitive skills needed to earn a decent living.

According to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, more than one out of three students had no significant improvement in such cognitive skills as critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing than they had when they graduated from high school.

In an interview with Bret Berk for Vanity Fair magazine, the authors said they followed more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year and tested them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking.

The authors said they did find some improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in their cognitive skills.

James Rosenbaum, of Northwestern University says Academically Adrift might be the most important book on higher education in a decade. He says that combined with students' limited effort and great disparities in benefits among students, Arum and Roksa's findings raise questions that should have been raised long ago about who profits from college and what colleges need to do if they are to benefit new groups of students.

As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise. The authors contend that these are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Just as we feared, our college student children spend nearly five times as much of their day in bed, playing video games, watching televison and updating their Facebook statuses as they do attending class and studying.

So what’s a parent supposed to do to make sure his or her child isn’t among that one third of students who spend four years and thousands of dollars just to go uneducated.

Arum and Roksa say they should encourage their college bound children to:

• Take classes that require plenty of reading, at least 40 pages a week and writing at least 20 pages per semester.
• Major in liberal arts over business
• Avoid joining fraternities and sororities
• Focus on cost and try to avoid taking on a lot of debt.