[lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

[Dissenting Wren]

Arum and Roksa's study doesn't entail the conclusion that Alan Rudy draws here.  
It's not hard to figure out the institutional incentives that drive this trend.  
Most students are looking to grab a credential with the lowest possible 
investment of labor.  Institutions are looking for money.  Consequence: students 
gravitate towards the easiest courses, and institutions invest in the programs 
that draw the most students.  Rigorous programs end up marginalized. (This set 
of incentives wouldn't work exactly the same way at institutions where tuition 
is not the main economic driver, but those are getting fewer and fewer).

I have a fair amount of experience here, because I came to Arum and Roksa's 
conclusions over a decade ago.  Since then I became director of my program, and 
my colleagues and I have worked to make sure that students do lots of 
challenging reading, write a lot, and spend much more time on task than students 
in other majors at this university.  You can imagine how popular I make myself 
when I call attention to this institutional problem at faculty meetings.  My 
colleagues get very defensive (and for good reason!) and administrators deflect, 
because they have no interest in taking on this fight.

The only way I see this changing at a particular institution is if folks at the 
top realize that this race to the bottom among its programs affects the economic 
value of the degree, and thereby makes it more difficult to recruit students.  
But that requires attentiveness to long-term problems and hard work to overcome 
the prisoner's dilemma I noted above.  Possible, but bloody unlikely.

In the end, this will probably be framed as a story of lazy, tenured radicals 
and their intellectually lax victim studies programs.  But that's not Arum and 
Roksa's story, which points toward a serious misalignment of institutional 
incentives.

----- Original Message ----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wed, January 26, 2011 9:27:51 AM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

On Jan 26, 2011, at 10:02 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:


> Yup, its the teachers'/professors' fault for not mandating greater rigor
> (and I know that's not what you meant to imply, Doug

Now of course I don't mean that, but there really is something terrible going 
on, with, you know, kids today not reading. You may have noticed that thread on 
the Progressive Sociologists list the other week, looking for suggested excerpts 
from The Communist Manifesto to assign, because the full text is too long. It's 
about 40 pages, for god's sake. This is very bad. We can talk for a long time 
about what's produced this situation, but it's still very bad.

Doug
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