How much students learn in college matters, and the value of Arum and Roksa’s efforts ultimately rises or falls on how well they resolve this difficulty. This difficulty, though, is not a warrant for educators to ignore the measurement of learning. Finally, there are many, many instances of professors and their institutions bucking these trends and finding ways to promote the learning of the young people who have been put in their care.ĭespite what many legislators, foundation officers, and business representatives often say to the contrary, measuring learning in higher education is hard and problematic. Next, and this aspect of Adrift has received less attention than the findings about learning and expectations, this dynamic helps no one, but it harms students of color and students with lesser financial resources more than it harms majority and more relatively affluent students. Moreover, too many of the institutions in which they are enrolled seem to focus more on social life than on academic life. The unwillingness of young people to work hard is largely because no one, their professors most of all, expect them to work hard. They learn relatively little because many don’t work very hard at their studies and are more focused on social experiences than they are on academic achievement. Many young people do not learn as much in the first two years of college as we would hope and expect that they would. In its barest bones, Arum and Roksa’s empirical message is a simple one.

Both provocatively titled and methodically constructed, Adrift elicited a response that often said as much about the reader as it did about the actual argument and evidence being advanced. It has now been several months since Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011) made its Category 5 presence felt on the higher education community. Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Title: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Academically adrift