Saturday, March 3, 2012

Wasting College Time and Funds

I would suggest two books about wasteful college education, a subject on which I cannot comment often enough. It’s a message to which the media gives little attention.

One study is “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (the University of Chicago Press), and “Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It,” by Andre Hacker and Claudia Dreifus (Macmillan).

The sociologist Andrew Hacker and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus say, among other points, that faculty attention on tenure and sabbaticals have an influence on the education a university offers. Too little effort involves the learning environment.

Sociologists Arum and Roska provide another serious view of the educational mess we consider the most prestigious college educators. Arum and Roska find about half of students do poorly in analytical reasoning and critical thinking as well as written communications during their first two years of college. (See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments.)

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