Five years ago, Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa took the educational world by storm. The book confirmed many of our worst suspicions: once admitted to college, undergraduates don’t actually learn much of use. Specifically, 45 percent of the undergraduates that Arum and Roksa tested demonstrated no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.
The book highlighted the importance of measuring student learning on campus. But many schools, including those in the UNC system, have resisted efforts to consistently test and disclose student learning outcomes. In yesterday’s article for the Pope Center, Stephanie Keaveney examines the UNC system’s 10-year plan to measure student learning—which still hasn’t been fully implemented.
Keaveney finds: What started as a promising step towards a coordinated system of assessment at all 16 UNC campuses now appears to be another lackluster attempt to appease all stakeholders, while avoiding concrete data that could spur serious and necessary reform at the campus level.
After years of pilot programs, the UNC system is no closer to consistently measuring student achievement than it was in 2007.
Keaveney concludes, “It’s not unreasonable to expect universities to provide data that shows students learn the things universities claim to teach.” Read her full analysis here.
I thought you mainly went to higher learning to be able to get a better job.It turns out it has nothing to do with that.It is so you can learn to be a community organizer and know why diversity is more important than anything else you can learn.It is also to teach you how to shout down anybody that doesn’t agree with your socialist professors.They don’t want you to hear anything that might cause you to question the garbage they are telling you.Then you leave there with a debt of thousands and get your waiter job.That’s a lot of money to learn how to drink and smoke dope.
After 40 years of hiring people with or without degrees,in my business I found that the sharp high school graduate that realized he didn’t know everything was easier to train than a college kid that already thought they knew everything.Employers that won’t even talk to a kid without a degree are doing themselves no favors.The best employee I ever had was a high school graduate and he was a quicker learner than any college kid I ever had.He worked for me for 40 years and had a lot to do with success of the company.