The Poor Quality of an Undergraduate Education

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

It’s commencement season, and American students seem pleased with their educations:

In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences.

That sounds wonderful, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say, except that college seniors haven’t learned much:

Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.

Arum and Roksa blame the shift toward treating students as paying customers. I think the problem is slightly different. The problem isn’t that teachers treat students as paying customers but that graders treat students as paying customers. Combining those two separate roles is the problem.

An SAT tutor or AP class instructor has no misaligned incentives, when its the College Board that scores the test.

Comments

  1. Bruce Charlton says:

    I don’t think self-grading is the reason for grade inflation, because when I began teaching in UK universities twenty-something years ago, we self-graded and grading was tough.

    Since then there has been incredible grade inflation, especially considering that the number of undergraduates has trebled in size and — obviously — declined in average standard.

    This inflation was driven by government via the educational administration system. It was impossible to resist with disadvantaging your own students.

    Grade inflation has not just been a matter of grading, but of the actual courses studied. In the English system, with specialized undergraduate degrees, people had usually studied their undergraduate subject for four years at school before beginning college, which then built on top of this foundation.

    Now there is seldom any requirement for school study, so (like the US system) most people’s college degree is taught from scratch, from the groud up, during the three years of the English system.

    So, the English have gone in a single generation from having about the highest standard to undergraduate degree (7 years of focused study) to probably the lowest standard (3 years) — and being rewarded with much higher grades, and these degrees requiring very little attendance and study (the lowest in Europe according to an authoritative survey).

    It is hard to exaggerate how bad the English system has become, but of course — since college education stopped being vocational — it is hardly noticeable. When college is, for most people, a waste of time, then it doesn’t really matter much how they waste their time, whether in sleeping, chatting and partying (as now) or in studying (as in the past)…

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