April 3, 2011
A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2
Brian Taylor
By Thomas H. Benton
What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.
In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college—at an ever greater cost—when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education?
Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.
One hopes for an emerging consensus—another Sputnik moment—that will affirm Arum and Roksa's position that we need to make "rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative." Whether that means college in a traditional sense is a different question. But that's a topic for another column.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich.
If you can access this, it's a pessimistic but pretty close pic of what I've seen, too.
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