Author Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University, co-authored Academically Adrift along with Josipa Roska, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. There is a decline in critical thinking skills among students and part of the reason for could be a decrease in academic rigor.
According to the study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.
Arum says, “There’s a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high.” 35 percent of students reported studying five hours per week or less, and 50 percent said they didn’t have a single course that required 20 pages of writing in their previous semester.
According to the authors: Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. Massive expansion of higher education, led by the public sector, has created unprecedented opportunities for students to continue their education beyond high school. … American higher education today educates more than eighteen million students in more than 4,300 degree-granting institutions. … with more than 90 percent of high school students expecting to attend college. … As Martin Trow has observed, higher education has been transformed from a privilege into an assumed right—and, for a growing proportion of young adults, into an expected obligation.
Although growing proportions of high school graduates are entering higher education, many are not prepared for college-level work a… Most American high schools have come to embrace a “college for all” mentality, encouraging students to proceed to higher education regardless of their academic performance. Consequently, high school students expect to enroll in college and complete bachelor’s degrees, even when they are poorly prepared to do so … sociologist James Rosenbaum reported that almost half of the students in the sample (46 percent) agreed with the statement: “Even if I do not work hard in high school, I can still make my future plans come true.”
… We begin our analysis by considering what these students bring to higher education, particularly in terms of academic preparation; what types of courses and activities they engage in; and, most importantly, how much they develop their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing over their first two years in college. As policymakers champion increasing access and improving graduation rates, it is appropriate to ask: How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much.
Link to article about the book: Academically Adrift