Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard ArumJosipa Roksa - University of Chicago Press (2011) - Paperback
In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college
every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing
number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense
of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone
strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by
Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once
they get there?For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and
Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their
extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for
the first time, the
state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test
administered to students in their first semester and then again at the
end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300
undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these
students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of
skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and
writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their
findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and
administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the
expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working
and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to
the bottom of the priority list.Academically Adrift holds sobering
lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and
parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring
contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number
of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at
their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.
Do It Yourself University: The Coming Transformation of Higher Education
By Anya Kamenetz
http://diyubook.com/
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education is my new book about the future of higher education. It’s a story about the communities of visionaries who are tackling the enormous challenges of cost, access, and quality in higher ed, using new technologies to bring us a revolution in higher learning that is affordable, accessible, and learner-centered.
Buy it direct from the publisher, Chelsea Green, or from Amazon , Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
By Page Smith
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Spirit-Page-Smith/dp/0670828173
From Publishers Weekly
"To the continuing debate about the ills of American higher education, Smith, founding provost of UC Santa Cruz, contributes probing, provocative insights. With a tribute to his undergraduate mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Harvard social philosophy professor and often disparaged radical thinker, the author sets about "mapping the desert" of contemporary higher education. After a lucid traverse of the development of education in the U.S., he sums up its present state as "Academic fundamentalism. . . the stubborn refusal of the academy to acknowledge any truth that does not conform to professorial dogmas." In Smith's view, a meld of the classical Christian traditions with secular democracy may restore the modern university as a true "academic community." 30,000 first printing; author tour.
