Consequently, high school students expect to enroll in college and complete bachelor's degrees, even when they are poorly prepared to do so judging from their grade point averages, high school rank, or courses taken. Most American high schools have come to embrace a "college for all" mentality, encouraging students to proceed to higher education regardless of their academic performance. As Martin Trow has observed, higher education has been transformed from a privilege into an assumed right-and, for a growing proportion of young adults, into an expected obligation.Īlthough growing proportions of high school graduates are entering higher education, many are not prepared for college-level work and many others have no clear plan for the future. And many are indeed crossing the threshold of higher education: more than 70 percent of recent high school graduates have enrolled in either a two-year or a four-year institution. Educational expectations have been on the rise, with more than 90 percent of high school students expecting to attend college. Although institutional barriers and inequalities in access persist and concerns about affordability continue to mount, American higher education today educates more than eighteen million students in more than 4,300 degree-granting institutions. Massive expansion of higher education, led by the public sector, has created unprecedented opportunities for students to continue their education beyond high school. Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. "Our country today is part of a global economic system, where we no longer have the luxury to put large numbers of kids through college and university and not demand of them that they are developing these higher order skills that are necessary not just for them, but for our society as a whole," Arum says. Richard Arum, a co-author of the book and a professor of sociology at New York University, tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that the fact that more than a third of students showed no improvement in critical thinking skills after four years at a university was cause for concern.
The study measured both the amount that students improved in terms of critical thinking and writing skills, in addition to how much they studied and how many papers they wrote for their courses. In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, two authors present a study that followed 2,300 students at 24 universities over the course of four years. As enrollment rates in colleges have continued to increase, a new book questions whether the historic number of young people attending college will actually learn all that much once they get to campus.
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