The American Association of Colleges and Universities held its annual meeting yesterday in Washington D.C., where a report on the post-graduation fortunes of students, titled "Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort," was released. The report was co-authored by Asst. Sociology Prof. Josipa Roksa and is the sequel to last year's critique of higher education, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses."
The report's release took place within hours, and blocks, of President Obama's State of the Union address, which discussed extensively the role of education in keeping the United States competitive. The two events are even closer than that, however. Both note that debt from student loans has surpassed that from credit cards and point to the financial difficulties of higher education as symptomatic of larger economic concerns. Obama called for an increased government role in assisting students, and "Uncertain Times" asks, in turn, that students be more civically engaged. Yet while it seems these reports are in communication, they are rather talking past each other, with "Uncertain Times" focusing on a particular measure of student achievement and the president instead embracing a different understanding of the purpose of higher education.
Like many reports in the social sciences, the most important section of "Uncertain Times" is found in its appendix, where the authors define the terms and methods by which they draw conclusions. Appearing again is the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the testing yardstick first made famous by "Academically Adrift." Students are also measured by "Academic Engagement/Growth," which is based on CLA scores, hours studied and the number of courses taken with a sufficient amount of reading and writing which would translate to satisfying the University's second writing requirement. Also included are categories for "College selectivity," measured by the 25th percentile of SAT scores for incoming freshmen, and students' "civic engagement," defined as the "frequency of reading the news, discussing politics and public affairs as well as volunteering," though the volunteering, for various reasons, was not included in the report's findings.
The report's conclusions are not at all shocking. Among the respondents - less than one-half of the same pool who participated in "Academically Adrift" - this new study found that those who did the worst on the CLA were more likely to be unemployed, living at home or in debt. In addition, students who completed degrees at "highly selective institutions" were less likely to be in debt or living at home after graduation. Finally, undergraduates deemed academically engaged - those taking courses with lots of writing and reading - were unsurprisingly found after graduating to be more civically engaged, which recall was narrowly defined as reading newspapers and discussing politics.
In contrast to this report championing reading, writing and political discourse, the president's bipartisan approach emphasizes instruction which is skills-based and oriented toward science and technology training. Moreover, the "Blueprint for an America Built to Last," the program which accompanied the State of the Union address, argues for "creating evaluation systems based on multiple measures, rather than just test scores" when it comes to education.
In the social sciences, causal questions are the most difficult to answer but might be the only ones worth asking. That students who performed highest on the CLA did better after graduating seems trivially true without taking into account lurking variables which might have contributed more to economic difficulties following graduation than anything indicated by a standardized test. In de-emphasizing the significance of tests and stressing other factors such as student access and the quality of teachers, Obama has shown that it is only reports assessing the state of the nation, and not just of the academy, which will prove valuable in repairing higher education.
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