Study: College Students Not Learning Much
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Study: College Students Not Learning Much
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Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#2Maybe 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?!?!"
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#3I'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?
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#41) 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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#5One 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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#61) 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 effec…
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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#7One 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 Harva…
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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#8I 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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#9The 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.
Re: Study: College Students Not Learning Much
#10Maybe 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?!?!"
"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?