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It’s college commencement season. Across the country, moms and dads,
grandparents, and other family members are gathering on campus quads,
football fields, and in basketball arenas to celebrate a rite of passage for
the Class of 2013.
The graduates are now ready for the next stage of their life—a job (
hopefully), their parents’ basement (maybe), graduate school, law school,
or maybe the Peace Corps or Teach for America. They’re definitely older
than when they went off to college. They’re probably heavier. And with a
bit of luck, they’re more mature than when they left high school.
But did these graduates actually learn anything in college to deserve that
diploma?
There’s much debate these days about the return on investment of a college
education. Much of that conversation is focused on what students spend on
college compared to what they get in return in terms of a salary. But if the
purpose of college is to get an education, why don’t we measure the return
on investment in terms of what students learn in college? After all, it’s
the learning that we’re actually paying for when we write tuition checks,
not training for a job that might be obsolete in two years.
Here’s the problem: we don’t know for sure how much students learn in
college. As much as we spend on college, no bottom-line evaluation method
exists for measuring what actually happens in the classroom and how that
eventually translates into the value of the degree. Sure, there are the U.S.
News & World Report rankings, but they mostly measure the students on their
way in the door (how many students a college rejected, SAT scores) or how
much colleges spend on faculty or students.
As much as colleges say they dislike the U.S. News rankings, they prefer
them to any alternative that might try to rank colleges on how much students
learn. Many colleges would like to keep prospective students and parents in
the dark when it comes to how much value they end up adding to a student's
life.
There are now ways to measure learning, chief among them the Collegiate
Learning Assessment. Known as the CLA, the essay-only test gives students a
set of materials and asks them to synthesize evidence and write a persuasive
argument. More than five hundred colleges use the exam to measure their
curriculum and teaching, although few release the results, or even averages,
publicly.
There are reasons they don’t want the public to know the truth. A few years
ago, two researchers tracked a representative sample of 2,300 students at
24 colleges and universities who took the CLA three times in their college
careers: at the beginning of their freshman year, at the end of their
sophomore year, and finally, before graduation.
The study’s bottom line: 45 percent of students in the study made no gains
in their writing, complex reasoning, or critical-thinking skills during
their first two years of college. After four years, the news wasn’t much
better: 36 percent failed to show any improvement.
The main reason for this, the researchers found, was a lack of rigor.
Through surveys they learned that students spent about 12 hours a week
studying on average, much of that time in groups. Most didn’t take courses
that required them to read more than 40 pages a week or write more than 20
pages over the course of an entire semester.
Students who studied alone did better, as did students whose teachers had
high expectations or assigned a significant amount of reading or writing.
Those who majored in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and
math did the best. And the majors that did the worst? Education, social work
, and the most popular major on US college campuses: business.
To determine how these students fared after college, the authors later
resurveyed more than nine hundred of them after graduation. Not surprisingly
, the students who scored the lowest on the CLA also struggled in life after
college. They were three times more likely than those scoring at the top to
be unemployed, twice as likely to be living at home with parents, more
likely to have run up credit card bills, and less likely to read the news or
discuss politics.
Now, many students graduating this month might think it’s fine that they
skated through college. But for students and parents who paid the tuition
bills thinking they were getting a rigorous and life-changing experience,
they deserved better. So do potential employers who will hire this month's
graduates. We need more authoritative and accurate ways of measuring the
value that a college adds to a student’s life than some arbitrary rankings
system created by a magazine that doesn’t even publish anymore. |
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