Featured Jobs University for the masses may be oversold Are students somehow getting smarter? I doubt it. by Christine Overall Four or five decades ago it used to be said that only about 15 percent of the population had the intellectual acumen to complete a university degree. University education was thought to be a privilege, not a right. When university was the preserve of the few, it??s not surprising that those from wealthy, well-educated families predominated. Working class students, not to mention poor ones, were grossly under-represented at Canada??s universities. Times change, and now a lot more people go to university. According to Statistics Canada , in 2006 nearly 4 million Canadians had a university degree ?? 24 percent more than five years earlier. This is, at least partly, a good thing if it means that the university system is bringing in a growing proportion of talented students from all socioeconomic levels, not just the top. Still, there are questions to raise about the academic implications of increasing rates of university attendance. While some growth may be due to the presence of gifted students from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic scale, that can??t explain all of it. What happened, in the last half century, to enable ever larger percentages to have realistic hopes of degree completion? Are students somehow getting smarter? I doubt it. A new investigation, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses , by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reports that 45 percent of American students studied