Tales of Unprepared Undergrads

By Jesse Singal Many American college students aren’t learning anything. That’s the distressing claim of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a new book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The authors found that 45 percent of the 2,300 students they analyzed showed no improvement in a range of vital skills, from critical thinking to writing, over the first two years of college. For many of those students, that means tens of thousands of dollars of debt with little to show for it. What’s going on? There are likely several factors at work, but graduate students may be […]