ADRIFT Promoting a “ House of Study ” April

Colleges and universities claim to do many things. In addition to strengthening students’ cognitive skills, many institutions promise to transform students, socially and ethically. As a result, measures of institutional success are too frequently based on subjective assessments of students’ values, orientations, and social growth. For example, colleges and universities may claim success if students develop a greater commitment to diversity, participate in volunteer work, or merely express satisfaction with their college experience. Even when objective measures of outcomes are used, they frequently focus on graduation rates, student retention, employment statistics, and successful applications to graduate school and law school. Colleges that report impressive student outcomes often start with better students, such that institutional success is merely a reflection of the ability to recruit the best and brightest applicants. In order to measure student learning, we need measures that consider change in cognitive skill over time. Using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), Arum and Roksa (2011) make a compelling case that colleges and universities fail to produce significant “value added” growth in students’ critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. One easy criticism of Arum and Roksa’s work is that the measures of student outcomes used in their study are fairly limited. For example, the researchers find that volunteer work, group study time, and extracurricular activities do not produce gains in CLA scores and, in fact, may actually hinder student learning. One could merely reject Arum and Roksa’s conceptualization of the university’s mission and argue that these types of activities and experiences produce other valuable outcomes. It is not difficult to find arguments that colleges and universities are responsible for promoting social change. One of our own institutions claims to “affirm the values of peace, non-violence, human dignity and social justice. ” (See Elizabethtown College’s mission statement, available online at http://www.etown.edu/public.aspx? topic=Institutional+Mission+Statement) Perhaps the real value of higher education is in transforming students’ values and perspectives. Yet, a number of other recent studies suggest that college education produces little change in these types of outcomes as well. In The Still Divided Academy (Rothman et al. 2011), we provide evidence that there is very little difference in students’ social and political values between the beginning and end of their college careers. For example, college seniors and their first-year counterparts have similar attitudes on government involvement in job creation and income distribution. The two groups are also remarkably similar in their attitudes toward homosexuality (p. 76). Similarly, in their study of students after 4 years at UCLA, Sidanius and colleagues (2008) find that exposure to diversity and multicultural programming produced little notable effect on students, especially in regard to “whites’ political and racial attitudes, which seemed to be quite crystallized at college entry and were quite stable across the college years” (p. 318). While this is encouraging for those who express concern about ideological indoctrination on college campuses, it raises serious doubts about any claim that, in the absence of cognitive learning, colleges are producing significant behavioral and attitudinal outcomes. In short, we are convinced by Arum and Roksa’s argument that students are not learning as much as they A. Kelly-Woessner (*) Department of Political Science, Elizabethtown College, 1 Alpha Drive, Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA e-mail: kellya@etown.edu