Statistics aside, what are today’s students really getting out of college? Commentary Michael A. MacDowell

THE 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, spawned much criticism that was directed mainly at elementary and secondary school educators.

The new academic year is only days old for many of today’s students, but additional questions recently have surfaced about whether students are learning what they should be. Critics have asked this: How do we measure the progress of students and should school districts and teachers be held responsible for progress or the lack thereof?

Now the debate has moved on to colleges. Much of what the public knows about college students today comes from public intellectuals and columnists such as Daniel Akst (see his commentary in The Times Leader of June 19), who often ask questions that many hold privately. “Coasting through college at keg parties and bong blasts can be fun but not productive,” Akst writes, adding, “Don’t ask me how I know.” It is interesting that most of the popular critics of higher education often admit they engaged in many of the same activities for which they scold college students today. And yet these bright public critics emerge from college with the capability to land themselves excellent positions that afford them the opportunity to critique college antics.

Today, rich and famous Harvard dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are pointed to as reasons why some people should not attend college. Forgotten is the fact that they were admitted to Harvard in the first place – a feat accomplished by only 6 percent of the 35,000 who applied last year. Gates and Zuckerberg are solid examples of non-college graduates who have done well for themselves and who also became vested in their communities. What a lot of people don’t realize, though, is the probability of doing as well as they did without a college degree is roughly the equivalent of landing a multimillion-dollar contract with the NBA or NFL.

What we do know for certain about college graduates is that on average they earn $1.3 million more over their lifetimes than do individuals with only a high school degree. We also know that while the national unemployment rate hovers at about 9 percent for high school graduates, the number is closer to 4 percent for those with a college degree. Just as important, though, is the fact that college graduates are more involved in their communities, vote more often, volunteer to serve others in greater numbers and pay more taxes. Perhaps that is why a recent national research study showed that 84 percent of two- and four-year college graduates said their degrees were a good investment.

While society tends to value a college education, the broader question that college educators are asking themselves nowadays is what is the “value added” by obtaining a college degree? Two college educators, Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, question what collegians get from their advanced degrees in their recent book, “Academically Adrift.”

Arum and Roksa didn’t theorize about what students learned in college; instead, they asked them. Using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument designed to measure the critical thinking skills of students before and after four years of college, they measured a group of college freshmen and college seniors to see what value a college education offered. One finding was that some college curricula lacked rigor. They found that many college students had not written a paper of more than 20 pages during their last semester and few read more than 45 pages of text or readings per class week. As a result, “45 percent of the students showed no significant improvements in knowledge.”

Arum recently came to Misericordia University to present at an annual conference on college learning assessment. Our faculty and administrators, along with those from five other Northeastern Pennsylvania institutions, participated. While it is easy to summarize Arum’s thinking in sound bites and percentages, his message is more complex. He suggests educators at the collegiate level should introduce more rigorous curriculum into their courses.

The work of our colleagues in higher education is important because it measures some outcomes of a college education. Other researchers and educators believe additional measurables need to be considered as well. The Survey of Student Engagement, for example, measures college students’ involvement in the learning process, hence their motivation to learn both in college and by inference later in life.

As the president of an institution whose students have done well on both the CLA and the NSSE surveys, I question the value of these instruments in predicting the future success of any particular student. I am in agreement, however, with the fact that these surveys say a lot about an undergraduate’s relationship with the college he or she attends and the professors with whom — at least at smaller institutions — the student has the opportunity to interact.

Standardized measurements, whether they are an SAT or ACT at the high school level, or CLAs and NSSE surveys at the college level, are helpful. They provide those of us charged with managing institutions of higher learning and our faculty the opportunity to adjust what they do in order to add greater value to what schools and colleges provide their students and society. We owe that to our students who are, after all, our future.

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