Www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/01/art1full.pdf. Www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2010/Rosenbaum.pdf. Www.fhsu.edu/teacher-scholar/resources/Current-Issue/Volume-3/Academically_Adrift.pdf. Graduation rates of first-time postsecondary students who started as full-time degree/certificate-seeking students, by sex, race/ethnicity, time to completion, and level and control of institution where student started: Selected cohort entry years, 1996 t. Is college too easy? As study time falls, debate rises.
Ashley Dixon, a sophomore at George Mason University, anticipated more work in college than in high school.
Instead, she has less. In a typical week, Dixon spends 18 hours in classes and another 12 in study. All told, college course work occupies 30 hours of her week. Dixon is a full-time student, but college, for her, is a part-time job. “I was expecting it to be a lot harder,” said Dixon, 20, of Haymarket. Declining study time is a discomfiting truth about the vaunted U.S. higher-education system. Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Academic leaders counter that students are as busy as ever but that their attention is consumed in part by jobs they take to help make ends meet. Consider George Mason, Virginia’s largest public university and a microcosm of modern academia. “It’s not enough,” said Peter Stearns, the George Mason provost. Tradition suggests that college students should invest two hours in study for every hour of classes. Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by attendance status, sex of student, and control of institution: Selected years, 1947 through 2010.
Percentage of the population 25 to 64 years old who attained selected levels of postsecondary education, by age group and country: 2001 and 2009. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (9780465087570): Diane Ravitch. Percentage of persons age 25 and over and of persons 25 to 29 years old with high school completion or higher and a bachelor's or higher degree, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1910 through 2011. It’s time to drop the college-for-all crusade. Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college.
From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs. College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. We overdid it.
For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. In a recent book, “Academically Adrift,” sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that 45 percent of college students hadn’t significantly improved their critical thinking and writing skills after two years; after four years, the proportion was still 36 percent.