20 thoughts on “Review of Academically Adrift”

  1. A few observations:

    1. If a certification mechanism appeared whereby the knowledge could be certified independently of its source, many of these problems would disappear. On the other hand, the forces arrayed against that certification mechanism are incredibly strong.

    I commented on the University of London approach (from a post by Mark J Perry) on these matters here:

    http://josecamoessilva.tumblr.com/post/6403829980/

    and that links to the post about the U of London’s certification approach.

    2. The “School of Education” being the worst school on campus is why all courses from 5th grade on in Portugal (and I assume most of Europe) are taught by people with degrees in their discipline (so people with Physics or Chemistry undergrad degrees can teach Phys/Chem in middle school). This should be a requirement; instead is apparently against the rules.

    3. As a business professor I’m always dismayed at the bottom rank of business schools in the intellectual order; my hope is that the emphasis on analytics gets schools to be both more selective and teach useful material.

    4. I think any technological attempt to solve these societal problems that starts to get traction will be hit with the same problems that have destroyed the universities. As you mention, there are many people who insist on bringing to bear variables other than effort and outcome.

    5. As long as “good teacher” is interpreted by those who recruit and promote (or fire) teachers as a person whom the students _like_ as opposed to a person whose students _learn_ there will be a drift towards easy course and grades.

    Cheers,
    JCS

  2. When interviewing for a job with a school in New Zealand, I was told that final exams are shipped to other universities to be graded. If so, it should be possible to look at how your proposed grading system works in practice.

  3. I wonder why you avoid the obvious HBD conclusion: some people just have better genes abstract thought. When only a small fraction of the population went to college, these were the majority; now they are not. Of course, there are many things that are neat, simple, obvious, and wrong.

  4. Anthony: The authors tried to look carefully at what college was contributing to each student, adjusting for how well the student was doing as a freshman. So their results should be adjusted for overall ability level.

    As a helicopter instructor, I’m not a believer in innate talent. Nobody was born knowing how to fly a helicopter. Smart young people tend to pick up the required skills faster, but nearly everyone can learn eventually. It requires some hard work by the student and some adaptability by the instructor. I think the point of the Academically Adrift authors is that most universities aren’t requiring most students to work hard. And by definition the professors who have very limited contact with students aren’t going to be adapting to individual student needs.

  5. Sadly, I think that even if online universities figure out a way to provide an excellent education, college graduate illiteracy will remain about the same. Consider the top 10% of college students who improved their CLA scores. Apparently university functions for them in some capacity. Why them and not the others? Could it be that only a small number of students want to get an education and the rest only want to get a degree?

    You observed, “The only group whose interests might be served by a more effective educational system are those students who aren’t learning in the current system.” I cynically suggest that it is precisely those students who would fail to benefit from an improved system.

    Even more cynically, if the students enrolling at University of Phoenix are not more motivated to learn than their traditional peers, what incentive is there for Phoenix to improve beyond what is necessary to maintain accreditation?

    (Note: I’m a former TA. The experience did not endear me to the bottom 90%.)

  6. It’s so simple, isn’t it? People act in their own (perceived) best interests – and whose interest dictates that the next generation should be better educated? On the contrary, many of the elite (in politics, business, education, etc.) have a strong vested interest in the great mass of the people remaining poorly educated.

    The distinction between education and training is relevant. According to your review, the authors found that colleges perform training to a fairly low standard, and neglect education almost entirely. It is very much to politicians’ taste to have an uneducated electorate, because then the advertising and propaganda that they can buy will encounter less opposition in the minds of the voters.

    It is also to business leaders’ taste – educated people would probably be much less likely to buy the mounds of junk that pass for consumer goods these days.

    Unfortunately, it is in everybody’s interests for the next genration to be better educated than we were. Tragedy of the commons.

  8. I think dorms are much more useful than office spaces, and that online education is a scam. Very simple: if one is good at learning on his own, he can do just as well reading books without any online magic. If he’s not, he needs interaction with someone who can explain stuff. And those “someones” ain’t faculty (for very many reasons, from “too busy doing research” to “just don’t give a damn”). They are the fellow students in the dorm.

  9. I found it shocking in engineering school how truly stupid some of the engineers were. I mean there were some smart people, but by and large, most of them had just developed good study habits and could churn out equations and solutions by example but had little knowledge of the theory and science behind it. They got their degrees and if you asked them 1 month after their final exams questions about the material….they wouldn’t have a clue.

  10. You seem to equate being smart with earning more money. I would argue that history has shown that a lot of very smart people have other priorities in life.

  11. Tiago: It is possible that young Americans have now acquired so much education that they are too smart to be bothered with anything as mundane as a job. Perhaps their writing skills are so good that they don’t want to waste them on writing boring prose and research summaries, so they’re living at home with Mom and writing epic poetry. However, research by sociologists and economists does not support this.

    http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/02/17/david-brooks-young-americans-are-poor-because-they-want-to-be-poor/ references a couple of studies that found that young Americans are more materialistic than they were in the 1960s and that Americans are working 20 percent more hours, per capita, than they did in 1970.

  12. Sad to see that business and education majors, who seem to be pulling the strings in society, make the least improvement during college.

    College graduates majoring in anything less objective than science and math are likely to come out as dumb as when they entered. Below is a video of professors using expensive tax funded class time to equate capitalism to fascism and support their communist party ideas:

    This is from a class by Judy Ancel and David Giljum on labor studies from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. And, uh, oh yeah, colleges and universities need more money:

    http://www.facebook.com/standupforucla

    Even after paying for all that college, graduates are still convinced “IOUCLA”

  13. Phil: for ‘other priorities’ in life I wasn’t referring to being lazy and not working. Just that people might opt for occupations whose sole purpose is not the accumulation of wealth. As in, being smarter they could earn more in other jobs, but they chose their occupation for reasons other than money.

    Perhaps I am biased, being a scientist. (Who in their right mind would do science for money nowadays?) But I can think of a few other areas that draw smart people, for less money than they could possibly have.

  14. Tiago: So the more educated a country, beyond a very basic level of arithmetic and literacy, the lower you’d expect the average income to be? Because everyone is so smart and spends all of their time thinking the deep thoughts rather than selling tires to each other? Where is your evidence for this? What country has experienced a measurable gain in education levels and simultaneously had a falling median income per hour?

    (The U.S. certainly does not provide evidence for your theory. The measured rise in educational achievement from World War II through the 1970s corresponded with a big rise in personal income. The stagnation in measured educational achievement since then has corresponded with a stagnation in median income per hour worked.)

  16. mishka: Grigori Perelman is indeed a smart guy, but he does live with his mom. If you watch Wayne’s World, you will hear Garth explain the disadvantages of that lifestyle (also kind of tough on the moms of the world).

  17. “They don’t mention the fact that it would be illegal for most school systems to hire the science, math and humanities majors who outperformed the education majors. ”

    Whoa! Why is that?

  18. JK: To become a government-paid schoolteacher in most parts of the U.S., one must be certified and to do so requires taking classes in “education”, typically from a school of education. There is also an exam. Anyway, a Ph.D. in English might be qualified to teach at Yale, but is illegal for a public school in New Haven to hire. A Ph.D. in Physics would not be qualified to teach high school physics.

    http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/CREDS/iSS-5.html explains California’s requirements, which are typical. This page is for people who say that they didn’t get a degree in education: “You are not eligible to apply for a teaching credential at this time. You must complete a professional teacher preparation program, including successful student teaching, at the level you wish to teach. Programs will vary slightly from college to college, but all programs will include specific requirements established by the Commission.”

  20. The notion of signaling seems to be absent from this discussion (or perhaps I haven’t read the other comments closely enough).

    Most skills are learned on the job, not in college. College is used by employers as a sorting mechanism. The student who is willing to jump through a series of arbitrary hoops (college admissions, extracurriculars, problem sets, exams) demonstrates that he is conscientious, follows instructions, and would make a good member of a bureaucracy.

    Recall of material learned in school decreases rapidly and approaches zero as the years go by. Many students find a career unrelated to their college major.

    If college is primarily about signaling, improving every college’s ability to stuff knowledge into students’ heads will not yield large returns. The RANK ORDER of students matters, not the amount of knowledge ingested. The top students will still follow the prestige track (Ivy league, finance/consulting, etc.) , and the worst will still follow the crap track, even if ALL teaching establishments are somewhat more successful.

    As Phil writes, the quality of teaching at Harvard is far worse than at many unknown colleges. To colleges, prestige matters and teaching is secondary. To students, successful hoop-jumping matters and learning is secondary.

    Everyone is angling for a higher peg in the grand, zero-sum hierarchy of prestige and meritocratic success. Our society is SO, SO, SO far away from a world in which high-school juniors go, “Where will I learn the most?”

    Sure, more education boosts skills somewhat and increases MPL and wages. But the wild disconnect between school learning and job skills ensures that returns to improving education are small.

    Bryan Caplan (of Tiger Mom fame) deserves credit for beating the signaling drum forcefully:

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html

    or search in google:
    caplan signaling model of education site:econlog.econlib.org

Comments are closed.