How low can it go?

…though the people who have performed these studies come at the question from different directions with differing social and political attitudes and with differing methodologies, there is very little difference in their conclusions. They all find that recent graduates seem to have been very poorly educated. One study after another has found that they write badly, can’t reason, can’t read any reasonably complex material, have alarming gaps in their knowledge of the history and institutions of the society in which they live, and are in general poorly prepared for the workplace.

The most interesting—and devastating—of these studies is that by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, whose book documenting their study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, appeared in 2011. Arum and Roksa found that higher education in America today “is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” More specifically, “An astounding proportion of students are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains in general skills as assessed by the CLA [Collegiate Learning Assessment].” The authors also find “at least some evidence that college students improved their critical thinking skills much more in the past than they do today.”

Looking at a sample of more than 2,300 students, Arum and Roksa observed “no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students” tracked in their study. What is interesting here is that the two researchers seem somewhat puzzled by these results. Nonetheless, they see clearly enough that the blame must rest with the faculty—that students didn’t just get dumber for no reason. Arum and Roksa think the problem must be that professors don’t demand enough of students. In one sense they are right (though not in the way they probably intend), but they seem unwilling to ask why this change has happened. It can’t be that faculty suddenly became lazy.

Like the public-education system, this is a self-imposed and costly national disaster. Most of these people aren’t educated; they’re merely credentialed, and the credentials are in many cases worthless.

[Late-morning update]

Here’s an example of the problem.

[Update a couple minutes later]

No, U of California, you cannot ban the phrase “Chinese Virus.”