by James A. Bacon
In their book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (a University of Virginia sociology professor) documented that large numbers of students were going to college “while experiencing few academic demands, investing limited effort in their academic endeavors and showing disturbingly low gains in academic performance as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.”
Now, joined by two other researchers, Arum and Roksa have published a follow-up report, “Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort.” In the report, they track what happens to college students who graduated “on time” (within six years) when they enter the job market. A college degree may be a credential that all employers value, but the study found that students with high College Learning Assessment (CLA) scores fared far better than those with low scores.
Graduates who scored in the bottom quintile of the CLA were three times more likely to be unemployed than those who scored in the top quintile on the CLA (9.6 percent compared to 3.1 percent), twice as likely to be living at home (35 percent compared to 18 percent) and significantly more likely to have amassed credit card debt (51 percent compared to 37 percent).
Graduates who displayed high academic engagement/growth in their undergraduate years were less likely to have credit card debt than graduates who exhibited low academic engagement/growth (38 percent compared to 56 percent).
The report does not even touch upon the tens of thousands who start college and never earn a degree.
What more evidence do we need to question the widely propagated idea that “everybody who wants to go to college should be allowed to,” or that the way to “build human capital” is just to send more kids to college regardless of their inclination or capability to perform college work?
Tens of thousands of students and their parents are paying a very high price for an educational experience that teaches them very little. Not only are they saddling themselves with student loans, they incur an opportunity cost (money not earned) of attending classes when they could earning a paycheck and building skills in a field that doesn’t require a sheepskin.
The college-is-for-everyone mania is a cruel hoax, plunging tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of young people into indebtedness they may never be able to repay. Meanwhile, it threatens to create the next financial bubble (see “The Next Bubble: College Loans?“) that could lead to yet another bailout that the nation can ill afford. The magnitude of the disaster is only a tenth the size of the housing bubble, but it is no less demoralizing to its victims. How many of these government-spurred calamities must we endure before the politicians learn?
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