Academically Adrift with with Arum and Roksa.

Upon reading Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, I was struck by the data presented on college life and how much college life has changed, ranging from how students spend their time to the cost of higher education to the attitudes and focus of universities and their administration. I also found it frightening how all these aspects are interlinked and, thus, if one aspect is bad, it will greatly influence the others. For instance, because the focus of modern-day professors is often research and scholarship, the time and effort put into teaching is often negatively affected and professors are less inclined to assign challenging work or work that will require a lot of grading and feedback from the professor. It was easier to make sense of why such effects might happen when I considered Freire’s “banking concept” of education. I was appalled to see similar negative patterns and data in higher education not just in Nathan’s book My First Year but also in an article from Inside Higher Ed.

The focus on research and scholarship usually results in the cop-out method of lecturing/teaching a classroom material and administering a multiple choice test on the material. This kind of teaching, thus, encourages students to “learn”, that is through rote memorization, the bare minimum to pass the exam. This concept reminded me of Freire’s “banking concept” of education in which rote memorization is often used and the teacher is the ultimate authority in what is important/what you should “learn”. Any students whom disagree or do not understand this will do often do poorly in the exam.

When one juxtaposes the information presented in Nathan’s My First Year and that presented in Academically Adrift, it is troublesome to see the similar trend of strategic students that seem to care less about true learning than students in the past. This disturbing idea is demonstrated in Arum and Roska’s novel when they present data on cheating in college:

"In a longitudinal comparison of nine colleges, for example, college students who admitted that they copied from other students on tests or exams increased from 26 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1993.”

This comes to show, also, how strategic students take advantage of this watered down system of education to get their degree with minimum effort. With modern students studying less hours per week than students in the past, as Nathan reports, and the ease of cheating true learning in this educational system, one can understand why the percentage of cheating students as recently increased.

As if lack of dedication to true learning weren’t enough, the focus of universities also seems to be shifting from academia and students’ education to serving their desires and attracting “customers”, another common theme in both novels. One example of this can be found in the Inside Higher Education article that I wrote about earlier in which the university is aiming to attract customers by approaching domestic violence from a unique viewpoint.