6 ms·

Study: College Students Not Learning Much

44 points by sdizdar 16y ago

guywithabike 16y ago
Maybe the problem is not the college, but the slacker kids who skim by with the bare minimum effort. I'm always amused when the kids who used to tease me for taking college seriously post Facebook statuses like, "omg y cant i get a job?!?!"
- mkross 16y ago
  "Them darn kids aint learnin cuz they aint tryin!" Let's consider the assumption that between 36% and 45% of all undergrad students are slackers. Sure, a bunch of students aren't learning because they are slackers, but why there are SO MANY of them? Are there more slackers as a percentage of the population than in the past? Is the internet/cell-phone/facebook era changing the mentality of students to be more focused on the short term easiest/best solution? Or maybe the percent of slackers in the general populace is the same, but a much larger percentage of secondary students go on to undergrad. Well, why are so many more going on in school, especially those that are slackers? Parental/societal pressures might suggest that going to college is just "what you do" after high school. Or maybe peer pressure makes students continue in through school because their peers expect it of them. Perhaps it is sheer inertia that is the driving force; our slackers do whatever is the most expedient at the moment, so when the time comes they'd rather go to a generic college with an undecided major than to go and do something. Or, (and I like this theory the most), students feel a need, from an economical perspective, to get a degree in order to get a job. And then they go to school, with the singular goal of earning that piece of paper so they can get a job. At this point, "slacker" has been forced into the role by going to school just to be able to get a job afterwards. It's a means to an end, and incidental value is just that. At this point, it isn't just the college's fault, but the general expectations of employers. Why do you require a college degree? Is knowing the theory essential to doing the work or save a substantial amount of training or ramp-up time?
  - spamizbad 16y ago
    The assumption seems to be that employers are kidding themselves by hiring mostly college grads and are paying a premium for them. So let me pose this: If a college degree truly holds little value to an employer, why aren't there leaner, meaner companies springing up hiring the 68% of students who graduated high school but didn't qualify to attend a 4-year college in the United States? Their labor costs would be significantly less than a competitor's who insists on hiring people with at least a 4-year degree. The reason why they insist on the 4-year degree, I suspect, is that labor costs are so high in the United States that paying the premium for a 4-year degree is negligible to your bottom line, so hey, why not save yourself the time of filtering through even more resumes and just demand a bachelors degree? It's not like college is going to make anyone worse at their job. As an added bonus, people who carry debt in the form of student loans or mortgages are less likely to strike or change careers - so it's a win/win.
  - dspeyer 16y ago
    Universities don't do much to encourage students to work hard. You'll pass no matter what, and in many places can get an A by just cramming for the final. Worse, many classes adjust grading standards based on how students are doing, so anyone who studies hard is betraying their classmates. Fraternities are given official support while study groups are left to fend for themselves (not that much support is needed, but it would be a nice gesture). A football team that wins a championship can expect official schoolwide celebration, which no intellectual achievement would produce. People are influenced by social pressure. Children are especially influenced. And the pressures aren't really pushing toward learning. (A secondary conclusion is that if you want to learn a lot at college, your first act should be to find a network of friends who do value learning.)
  - psyklic 16y ago
    I'd guess slacking is mainly a culture thing. If your friends accept that it's okay, then you'll accept it's okay too.
- deleted 16y ago
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rafd 16y ago
I'm uncomfortable with how easily correlations are taken as causations. Will longer assignments 'teach' better? Or, is it that the students who are more willing to learn are also more willing to do longer assignments?
phamilton 16y ago
1) The study was done at the end of their sophmore year. 200 level course are not that difficult. 2) The study asked if students had a class required 20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading. Especially in engineering, this is often just not practical. In a senior level class, we only had ~20 pages of reading a week, but we spent countless hours building an RTOS from the ground up. That time was so much more effective than reading a book. As far as writing goes, I haven't written a paper in a long time, but multiple 60 hour coding projects are pretty common throughout a semester.
- mkross 16y ago
  1) "After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two." Thats 36% of students who spent four years without improving what the study authors deem as important cognitive abilities. Perhaps they learned all of their material sufficiently well to do XXX, but the study says they aren't, in a generalist sense, any smarter. 2) I can't tell from the article whether these statistics were actually influential in determining the students' scores on the test. I totally agree that this doesn't translate well between different majors. If the scores were affected by answering this question or the one about study habits or probably a number of others, then I don't really see the point of the study. They started from some sort of "if people take easier* classes, then they aren't as intelligent" baseline and then showed that people take easier* classes... * "easier," by their definition, has something to do with writing X pages or reading Y pages.
kenjackson 16y ago
One problem is there is no incentive on the part of the college to teach much. I've long advocated that we need output measures for colleges. Colleges are rated on their input measures -- how competitive is it to get into the school. But no measure of how effective they are at teaching. As of today no one can really say where (on average) you'll learn more/better -- at Harvard or Ohio State. All we know is that Harvard is more difficult to get into. I find that crazy that this is still the state of higher ed.
- reader5000 16y ago
  I think 80% of modern college value-added is signalling. Employers should really just accept SAT scores directly, although I'm not sure if that's legal. It would certainly be cheaper.
  - copper 16y ago
    Why isn't it legal, out of curiosity? I get to see quite a few CVs that include the rank the applicant got in the IIT-JEE exam (for most purposes, I find that to be a rather useless metric.)
    - barry-cotter 16y ago
      Griggs vs. Duke Power Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgme... Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2] the rankings from high to low by population group go Ashkenazi Jews >> East Asians >> Caucasian >> Blacks. The Disparate Impact legal doctrine[3] means that unless you can show business necessity any test that reliably discriminates between protected classes[4] is automatically illegal. The strength of this argument is weakened by the fact that TTBOMK no equivalent law exists in the rest of the Anglosphere. [1]And the LSAT, MSAT, GRE, GMAT etc. [2]This isn't completely accurate for those tests that measure concrete knowledge like the MCAT, but the correlation is still pretty high [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact [4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
lifestyleigni 16y ago
I have a problem with the metrics they use: 20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading They are going on the assumption that increased pages of writing and increased pages of reading is a metric for amount learned. There are so many lurking variables at play here. The attribution of cause and effect here to these arbitrary variables is an over simplification fallacy of what's really going on and why.
- dspeyer 16y ago
  That's not the metric. The metric is not described in detail, but it is alleged to test "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing". The non-textuality of the workload was a separate observation.
- sidek 16y ago
  Also, 20 pages of, say, Spivak's Calculus is simply more than , say, 20 pages of Michel de Montaigne essays.
joshkaufman 16y ago
The findings also will likely spark a debate over what helps and hurts students learn. To sum up, it's good to lead a monk's existence: Students who study alone and have heavier reading and writing loads do well. You can "lead a monk's existence" by yourself, without paying a college $40-50k per 30-week year. Hit the books, learn as much as you can, then go out into the real world and make things happen. It kills me that education and credentialing are so tightly bound together in popular perception. Learning is about what happens in your head, not necessarily what happens in a classroom. I'm kicking around an idea of an alternative credential for entrepreneurs, which would legally certify you've operated a real business at a certain profit level for a certain period of time. If you want to seek employment when you're done, most employers would recognize that you have economically valuable skills - above and beyond those of college graduates. If the business takes off, you won't care about the credential... which is a good thing. The amount you'd learn pursuing such a credential would put most college programs to shame.
- MaxGabriel 16y ago
  "See the sad thing about a guy like you is in fifty years you'll start doin' some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library" -Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s
- retroafroman 16y ago
  'If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want to learn, go to a library.' -Frank Zappa
symptic 16y ago
The problem isn't that college-aged kids are performing poorly. The problem is that we've raised kids in an educational system that is dying and underfunded at the early levels. We cut physical education, art, music, cancel recess, and expect kids kids to grow up fine while learning subpar English and Maths. Universities have to lower their standards to help provide a job market for these children with under-developed fundamentals.
deleted 16y ago
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davidwparker 16y ago
I know that for my undergrad, college seemed to be an extension of high school- and both the slackers and the non-slackers went to college. Now that I am in grad school, I don't notice many, if any, slackers. Does anyone have any similar stories?
- zerokyuu 16y ago
  I don't know the actual statistics, but I heard that nearly everyone from my high school went to college after graduating. Even though I got good grades, I was actually a bit of a slacker myself in high school; mostly because I did a lot of extra curricular activities (ice/roller hockey, drumline, cello, studied Japanese and computer stuff). However, I heard somewhere that about 30% of the kids from my high school would drop out from college in their first two years. This seems about right based on what I saw on Facebook. Some of them were slackers, some of them must have had no interest in college and probably shouldn't have bothered going. Anyway, I'm in grad school now, and I haven't noticed many slackers (maybe a grad student taking a weekend off?). Although, I didn't really notice many slackers in college either. That may be because I went to a research-focused University to study engineering.
sprout 16y ago
I actually took part in this study. A few notes: 1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years. 2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark. 3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors. I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.
- JesseAldridge 16y ago
  Could you elaborate on what the exam was like?
  - sprout 16y ago
    It was a series of reading comprehension problem-solving problems with short answer response. One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning. It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.
- narkee 16y ago
  I think given enough students, 3 data points over 4 years is a perfectly appropriate dataset from which to measure longitudinal effects. I'm not saying I don't agree that the test may not have measured anything useful, or that there wasn't some sampling bias, but there's nothing inherently wrong with 3 data points per person over four years.
adambourg 16y ago
These people are idiots. 2300 college students interviewed... Think about that for 1 minute. That's a sample of less then 10% the size of my university. There are hundreds or even thousands of schools with over 10,000 students. Where has this sample been taken? What colleges? How diverse was the population? Socio-economic statuses? These are all big concerns I have with this statistic. Also, what are they measuring? English? Maths? Sciences? With all the high school emphasis on getting into college, I would not expect a serious improvement in the maths and English. If it's looking at general stuff, then yes, I would not expect a substantial shift, if we're talking about fields and careers then this is shocking data. Given all that. I am a college junior, I have learned so much about math (calculus), science, computer science and how to solve problems. More so then I ever could have dreamed. College has opened me up to many new learning opportunities. While the fault could be at the college, more then likely; however, it's on the student, not the school.
- nocipher 16y ago
  Statistically, you do not need a certain percentage of the population you are surveying to obtain good results. There are other factors used to determine the required sample size to achieve results with a given level of confidence. See the article below if you're interested in the details. Organizational Research: Determining Appropriate Sample Size in Survey Research http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf
- idm 16y ago
  > These people are idiots. 2300 college students interviewed... Think about that for 1 minute. Common sense is no substitute for an intro stats class. 2300 is plenty.
  - deleted 16y ago
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Bud 16y ago
I'm not impressed that this article couldn't even make it ten words without making a major error. Especially given the headline.
patrickgzill 16y ago
I think if you "compare and contrast" how you learned $x (something you learned outside of school), and how subjects are taught in college, that might lead to some insight.
idm 16y ago
College rocked my world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. You get out what you put in.
- davidu 16y ago
  This. And the fact that lots of people go to college who aren't mature enough to know that. Or they go because their parents make them and so they party and dick around. The reality is that many kids who go to college --- shouldn't.
Legion 16y ago
For some people, college is truly a joke of an academic experience. I worked a couple of on-campus jobs at the school I attended. One of those jobs was in the department of Recreation Administration. I couldn't believe it was a major that people paid money to go to school and study. I couldn't believe the tests I photocopied were real - I could easily pass them, and what I didn't know was obviously information easily obtained from a minimal amount of reading of the textbooks. It was comical, really, although the parents paying the same tuition for that that my parents paid for my CompSci education shouldn't find it funny. It seems to me like there are an increasing number of "paths of low resistance" through college.
jakeg 16y ago
Well since critical thinking and "complex reasoning" are impossible to measure on a standardized test, the entire article is pretty much pointless. I.E. the media needs to stop acting like the important effects of education can be measured easily and en masse and therefore reported on in their articles.
tybris 16y ago
College isn't about learning, it's about developing intellectually.
- barry-cotter 16y ago
  I challenge you to develop that statement, so that I know what you meant to say rather than imputing it. An uncharitable interpretation would be that college could be taught with no resources beyond those available at secondary school, since in a number of fields it would be quite possible to use the secondary school intellectual tools to construct your own knowledge, e.g. 30 motivated Math students might be able to rederive up to Calculus II or III given four years to do it.
  - tybris 16y ago
    At college, you develop yourself intellectually, through interaction with peers, professors, understanding complex material, finding the fundamental insights that underly your field, building an maintaining a network, developing your skill as a leader and/or a team player, learning how to read and write at a sophisticated level, and how to go beyond these things. Your brain is a living organ that needs training like a muscle, but it is incomparably more complex than any other part of your body. You need to run with the best to be able to follow their footsteps, to foster the techniques and gain the insights that will lead you into a wealthy, interesting and happy life and perhaps one that can change the world. You don't need to be aware of all of this when you're in it, it happens in the ingenious way in which college has developed itself, even if you drop out. I don't know which philosopher is to blame for the idea that a brain is some kind of black box and school is there to put knowledge in it, but I'd send him back to college.
stretchwithme 16y ago
declining quality and costs rising faster than inflation. hmmm, I wonder what entity could be responsible for distorting yet another industry.
gexla 16y ago
People just aren't taking the right kind of classes. A math class which is a higher level than anything you have taken before is sure to teach you something. A writing class which is higher level than anything you have taken before (not as easy to measure, this is more due to a better quality instructor) is sure to teach you something. Along with a lot of writing is usually paired up with a lot of reading, which is also sure to teach you something. Outside of those areas... It's the three R's; readin, ritten, rithmatic. Unfortunately, a lot of programs don't require those areas. People who aren't heavy into those areas in college should probably be going to a vocational school rather than a university.
lynx44 16y ago
I don't agree with the approach this article uses to gauge learning. For one thing, it completely puts down science and math courses. In a multivariable calc class, we didn't have reading or writing (though I did have more than 40 pages of homework!) Second, it's a bit arbitrary.
jchonphoenix 16y ago
Is not taking a class that requires you to write 20 pages or read 40 pages within the last semester an issue? I find that, as people in technical majors progress through the years, they take less and less humanities and more and more major specific classes. It might be worrying if math majors didn't take a class that requires problem sets in the last semester. Or english majors didn't take classes that required writing. But to suggest that students aren't learning because they aren't taking courses relevant to their major is a biased assertion.

44 points by sdizdar 16y ago

Maybe the problem is not the college, but the slacker kids who skim by with the bare minimum effort. I'm always amused when the kids who used to tease me for taking college seriously post Facebook statuses like, "omg y cant i get a job?!?!"

mkross 16y ago
"Them darn kids aint learnin cuz they aint tryin!" Let's consider the assumption that between 36% and 45% of all undergrad students are slackers. Sure, a bunch of students aren't learning because they are slackers, but why there are SO MANY of them? Are there more slackers as a percentage of the population than in the past? Is the internet/cell-phone/facebook era changing the mentality of students to be more focused on the short term easiest/best solution? Or maybe the percent of slackers in the general populace is the same, but a much larger percentage of secondary students go on to undergrad. Well, why are so many more going on in school, especially those that are slackers? Parental/societal pressures might suggest that going to college is just "what you do" after high school. Or maybe peer pressure makes students continue in through school because their peers expect it of them. Perhaps it is sheer inertia that is the driving force; our slackers do whatever is the most expedient at the moment, so when the time comes they'd rather go to a generic college with an undecided major than to go and do something. Or, (and I like this theory the most), students feel a need, from an economical perspective, to get a degree in order to get a job. And then they go to school, with the singular goal of earning that piece of paper so they can get a job. At this point, "slacker" has been forced into the role by going to school just to be able to get a job afterwards. It's a means to an end, and incidental value is just that. At this point, it isn't just the college's fault, but the general expectations of employers. Why do you require a college degree? Is knowing the theory essential to doing the work or save a substantial amount of training or ramp-up time?
- spamizbad 16y ago
  The assumption seems to be that employers are kidding themselves by hiring mostly college grads and are paying a premium for them. So let me pose this: If a college degree truly holds little value to an employer, why aren't there leaner, meaner companies springing up hiring the 68% of students who graduated high school but didn't qualify to attend a 4-year college in the United States? Their labor costs would be significantly less than a competitor's who insists on hiring people with at least a 4-year degree. The reason why they insist on the 4-year degree, I suspect, is that labor costs are so high in the United States that paying the premium for a 4-year degree is negligible to your bottom line, so hey, why not save yourself the time of filtering through even more resumes and just demand a bachelors degree? It's not like college is going to make anyone worse at their job. As an added bonus, people who carry debt in the form of student loans or mortgages are less likely to strike or change careers - so it's a win/win.
- dspeyer 16y ago
  Universities don't do much to encourage students to work hard. You'll pass no matter what, and in many places can get an A by just cramming for the final. Worse, many classes adjust grading standards based on how students are doing, so anyone who studies hard is betraying their classmates. Fraternities are given official support while study groups are left to fend for themselves (not that much support is needed, but it would be a nice gesture). A football team that wins a championship can expect official schoolwide celebration, which no intellectual achievement would produce. People are influenced by social pressure. Children are especially influenced. And the pressures aren't really pushing toward learning. (A secondary conclusion is that if you want to learn a lot at college, your first act should be to find a network of friends who do value learning.)
- psyklic 16y ago
  I'd guess slacking is mainly a culture thing. If your friends accept that it's okay, then you'll accept it's okay too.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

rafd 16y ago

I'm uncomfortable with how easily correlations are taken as causations. Will longer assignments 'teach' better? Or, is it that the students who are more willing to learn are also more willing to do longer assignments?

phamilton 16y ago

1) The study was done at the end of their sophmore year. 200 level course are not that difficult. 2) The study asked if students had a class required 20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading. Especially in engineering, this is often just not practical. In a senior level class, we only had ~20 pages of reading a week, but we spent countless hours building an RTOS from the ground up. That time was so much more effective than reading a book. As far as writing goes, I haven't written a paper in a long time, but multiple 60 hour coding projects are pretty common throughout a semester.

mkross 16y ago
1) "After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two." Thats 36% of students who spent four years without improving what the study authors deem as important cognitive abilities. Perhaps they learned all of their material sufficiently well to do XXX, but the study says they aren't, in a generalist sense, any smarter. 2) I can't tell from the article whether these statistics were actually influential in determining the students' scores on the test. I totally agree that this doesn't translate well between different majors. If the scores were affected by answering this question or the one about study habits or probably a number of others, then I don't really see the point of the study. They started from some sort of "if people take easier* classes, then they aren't as intelligent" baseline and then showed that people take easier* classes... * "easier," by their definition, has something to do with writing X pages or reading Y pages.

kenjackson 16y ago

One problem is there is no incentive on the part of the college to teach much. I've long advocated that we need output measures for colleges. Colleges are rated on their input measures -- how competitive is it to get into the school. But no measure of how effective they are at teaching. As of today no one can really say where (on average) you'll learn more/better -- at Harvard or Ohio State. All we know is that Harvard is more difficult to get into. I find that crazy that this is still the state of higher ed.

reader5000 16y ago
I think 80% of modern college value-added is signalling. Employers should really just accept SAT scores directly, although I'm not sure if that's legal. It would certainly be cheaper.
- copper 16y ago
  Why isn't it legal, out of curiosity? I get to see quite a few CVs that include the rank the applicant got in the IIT-JEE exam (for most purposes, I find that to be a rather useless metric.)
  - barry-cotter 16y ago
    Griggs vs. Duke Power Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgme... Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2] the rankings from high to low by population group go Ashkenazi Jews >> East Asians >> Caucasian >> Blacks. The Disparate Impact legal doctrine[3] means that unless you can show business necessity any test that reliably discriminates between protected classes[4] is automatically illegal. The strength of this argument is weakened by the fact that TTBOMK no equivalent law exists in the rest of the Anglosphere. [1]And the LSAT, MSAT, GRE, GMAT etc. [2]This isn't completely accurate for those tests that measure concrete knowledge like the MCAT, but the correlation is still pretty high [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact [4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

lifestyleigni 16y ago

I have a problem with the metrics they use: 20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading They are going on the assumption that increased pages of writing and increased pages of reading is a metric for amount learned. There are so many lurking variables at play here. The attribution of cause and effect here to these arbitrary variables is an over simplification fallacy of what's really going on and why.

dspeyer 16y ago
That's not the metric. The metric is not described in detail, but it is alleged to test "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing". The non-textuality of the workload was a separate observation.
sidek 16y ago
Also, 20 pages of, say, Spivak's Calculus is simply more than , say, 20 pages of Michel de Montaigne essays.

joshkaufman 16y ago

The findings also will likely spark a debate over what helps and hurts students learn. To sum up, it's good to lead a monk's existence: Students who study alone and have heavier reading and writing loads do well. You can "lead a monk's existence" by yourself, without paying a college $40-50k per 30-week year. Hit the books, learn as much as you can, then go out into the real world and make things happen. It kills me that education and credentialing are so tightly bound together in popular perception. Learning is about what happens in your head, not necessarily what happens in a classroom. I'm kicking around an idea of an alternative credential for entrepreneurs, which would legally certify you've operated a real business at a certain profit level for a certain period of time. If you want to seek employment when you're done, most employers would recognize that you have economically valuable skills - above and beyond those of college graduates. If the business takes off, you won't care about the credential... which is a good thing. The amount you'd learn pursuing such a credential would put most college programs to shame.

MaxGabriel 16y ago
"See the sad thing about a guy like you is in fifty years you'll start doin' some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library" -Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s
retroafroman 16y ago
'If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want to learn, go to a library.' -Frank Zappa

symptic 16y ago

The problem isn't that college-aged kids are performing poorly. The problem is that we've raised kids in an educational system that is dying and underfunded at the early levels. We cut physical education, art, music, cancel recess, and expect kids kids to grow up fine while learning subpar English and Maths. Universities have to lower their standards to help provide a job market for these children with under-developed fundamentals.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

davidwparker 16y ago

I know that for my undergrad, college seemed to be an extension of high school- and both the slackers and the non-slackers went to college. Now that I am in grad school, I don't notice many, if any, slackers. Does anyone have any similar stories?

zerokyuu 16y ago
I don't know the actual statistics, but I heard that nearly everyone from my high school went to college after graduating. Even though I got good grades, I was actually a bit of a slacker myself in high school; mostly because I did a lot of extra curricular activities (ice/roller hockey, drumline, cello, studied Japanese and computer stuff). However, I heard somewhere that about 30% of the kids from my high school would drop out from college in their first two years. This seems about right based on what I saw on Facebook. Some of them were slackers, some of them must have had no interest in college and probably shouldn't have bothered going. Anyway, I'm in grad school now, and I haven't noticed many slackers (maybe a grad student taking a weekend off?). Although, I didn't really notice many slackers in college either. That may be because I went to a research-focused University to study engineering.

sprout 16y ago

I actually took part in this study. A few notes: 1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years. 2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark. 3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors. I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.

JesseAldridge 16y ago
Could you elaborate on what the exam was like?
- sprout 16y ago
  It was a series of reading comprehension problem-solving problems with short answer response. One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning. It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.
narkee 16y ago
I think given enough students, 3 data points over 4 years is a perfectly appropriate dataset from which to measure longitudinal effects. I'm not saying I don't agree that the test may not have measured anything useful, or that there wasn't some sampling bias, but there's nothing inherently wrong with 3 data points per person over four years.

adambourg 16y ago

These people are idiots. 2300 college students interviewed... Think about that for 1 minute. That's a sample of less then 10% the size of my university. There are hundreds or even thousands of schools with over 10,000 students. Where has this sample been taken? What colleges? How diverse was the population? Socio-economic statuses? These are all big concerns I have with this statistic. Also, what are they measuring? English? Maths? Sciences? With all the high school emphasis on getting into college, I would not expect a serious improvement in the maths and English. If it's looking at general stuff, then yes, I would not expect a substantial shift, if we're talking about fields and careers then this is shocking data. Given all that. I am a college junior, I have learned so much about math (calculus), science, computer science and how to solve problems. More so then I ever could have dreamed. College has opened me up to many new learning opportunities. While the fault could be at the college, more then likely; however, it's on the student, not the school.

nocipher 16y ago
Statistically, you do not need a certain percentage of the population you are surveying to obtain good results. There are other factors used to determine the required sample size to achieve results with a given level of confidence. See the article below if you're interested in the details. Organizational Research: Determining Appropriate Sample Size in Survey Research http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf
idm 16y ago
> These people are idiots. 2300 college students interviewed... Think about that for 1 minute. Common sense is no substitute for an intro stats class. 2300 is plenty.
- deleted 16y ago
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Bud 16y ago

I'm not impressed that this article couldn't even make it ten words without making a major error. Especially given the headline.

patrickgzill 16y ago

I think if you "compare and contrast" how you learned $x (something you learned outside of school), and how subjects are taught in college, that might lead to some insight.

idm 16y ago

College rocked my world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. You get out what you put in.

davidu 16y ago
This. And the fact that lots of people go to college who aren't mature enough to know that. Or they go because their parents make them and so they party and dick around. The reality is that many kids who go to college --- shouldn't.

Legion 16y ago

For some people, college is truly a joke of an academic experience. I worked a couple of on-campus jobs at the school I attended. One of those jobs was in the department of Recreation Administration. I couldn't believe it was a major that people paid money to go to school and study. I couldn't believe the tests I photocopied were real - I could easily pass them, and what I didn't know was obviously information easily obtained from a minimal amount of reading of the textbooks. It was comical, really, although the parents paying the same tuition for that that my parents paid for my CompSci education shouldn't find it funny. It seems to me like there are an increasing number of "paths of low resistance" through college.

jakeg 16y ago

Well since critical thinking and "complex reasoning" are impossible to measure on a standardized test, the entire article is pretty much pointless. I.E. the media needs to stop acting like the important effects of education can be measured easily and en masse and therefore reported on in their articles.

tybris 16y ago

College isn't about learning, it's about developing intellectually.

barry-cotter 16y ago
I challenge you to develop that statement, so that I know what you meant to say rather than imputing it. An uncharitable interpretation would be that college could be taught with no resources beyond those available at secondary school, since in a number of fields it would be quite possible to use the secondary school intellectual tools to construct your own knowledge, e.g. 30 motivated Math students might be able to rederive up to Calculus II or III given four years to do it.
- tybris 16y ago
  At college, you develop yourself intellectually, through interaction with peers, professors, understanding complex material, finding the fundamental insights that underly your field, building an maintaining a network, developing your skill as a leader and/or a team player, learning how to read and write at a sophisticated level, and how to go beyond these things. Your brain is a living organ that needs training like a muscle, but it is incomparably more complex than any other part of your body. You need to run with the best to be able to follow their footsteps, to foster the techniques and gain the insights that will lead you into a wealthy, interesting and happy life and perhaps one that can change the world. You don't need to be aware of all of this when you're in it, it happens in the ingenious way in which college has developed itself, even if you drop out. I don't know which philosopher is to blame for the idea that a brain is some kind of black box and school is there to put knowledge in it, but I'd send him back to college.

stretchwithme 16y ago

declining quality and costs rising faster than inflation. hmmm, I wonder what entity could be responsible for distorting yet another industry.

gexla 16y ago

People just aren't taking the right kind of classes. A math class which is a higher level than anything you have taken before is sure to teach you something. A writing class which is higher level than anything you have taken before (not as easy to measure, this is more due to a better quality instructor) is sure to teach you something. Along with a lot of writing is usually paired up with a lot of reading, which is also sure to teach you something. Outside of those areas... It's the three R's; readin, ritten, rithmatic. Unfortunately, a lot of programs don't require those areas. People who aren't heavy into those areas in college should probably be going to a vocational school rather than a university.

lynx44 16y ago

I don't agree with the approach this article uses to gauge learning. For one thing, it completely puts down science and math courses. In a multivariable calc class, we didn't have reading or writing (though I did have more than 40 pages of homework!) Second, it's a bit arbitrary.

jchonphoenix 16y ago

Is not taking a class that requires you to write 20 pages or read 40 pages within the last semester an issue? I find that, as people in technical majors progress through the years, they take less and less humanities and more and more major specific classes. It might be worrying if math majors didn't take a class that requires problem sets in the last semester. Or english majors didn't take classes that required writing. But to suggest that students aren't learning because they aren't taking courses relevant to their major is a biased assertion.