By Stephanie Bathurst

Despite rising tuition costs and because of a poor job market, college enrollment rates are reaching historic numbers. In today’s economy, it’s obvious that education is a powerful tool, and a bachelor’s degree seems to be an absolute for nearly all career paths. But come graduation day, are students really getting the higher education they paid for?

A new book raises doubts about how much the millions of students attending two- and four-year colleges are actually learning in this country. “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” explores results of a study conducted throughout 24 universities over the course of four years.

Co-authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that colleges are failing at their most basic obligation: to make students smarter.

“We did not hypothesize that a large number of students were experiencing such meager academic demands and learning so little,” Arum said during a live Web chat on Feb. 14. “As social scientists we were surprised by this. As educators, we were deeply dismayed.”

Arum and Roksa found that 45 percent of university students do not demonstrate significant improvement in a range of skills, including critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing, during their first two years of college.

And they primarily blame the intellectual shortfall on the lack of rigor among professors and students.

Currently, the primary source of an instructor’s academic performance is measured by student evaluations and test scores, creating a significant incentive to ask less of students. The findings assert that when handing out easy grades and incorporating entertaining curriculum, a professor ensures positive course evaluations, and that they will have a job the following year.

“We have to use multiple indicators of teaching performance, such as review of syllabi, peer observations and sampling of student work. Course evaluations are not where we should focus our attention,” Arum said.

Rising tuition rates add to the pressure to do well in college. A high GPA can potentially lead to funding college tuition costs through grants and scholarships.

However, the authors make clear that teachers who distribute higher marks are not the only ones responsible for this waning academic trend. “We call for greater accountability among students, too,” Roksa said.

To measure undergraduate learning, the research examines how much time students dedicate to studying and the length of papers students write for their courses. The book reports that 50 percent of students do not enroll in courses requiring a writing assignment of 20 pages in length.

“Students have come to see themselves as consumers and clients, pursuing credentials that can be exchanged for labor market success,” Arum said.

If graduates expect to leave college with skill sets needed to begin a career, the responsibility is in their hands to make it happen, the authors suggest. They must challenge themselves to take advantage of the tools universities offer.

“In every college and university, we found students who applied themselves, took rigorous courses, and substantially improved their critical thinking, analytical reasoning and writing skills,” Roksa said. “Students clearly have to take responsibility for their own education. We have high expectations of them; we are not letting them off the hook.”

The Obama Administration’s proposed budget cuts, which would reduce support for higher education by $89 billion over 10 years, will create the need for larger class sizes and fewer available courses in universities across the nation. These cuts are sure to lower student-teacher interaction, and teacher involvement and accountability, leaving students in charge of  their own educations.

Some UT faculty members are taking steps to change this unnerving trend, by implementing the Course Transformation Program over the next three to five years. Launched Jan. 13, the Course Transformation Program is led School of Undergraduate Studies Dean Paul Woodruff and Vice Provosts Gretchen Ritter and Harrison Keller. The program aims to improve student success in large, lower-division gateway courses by incorporating innovative approaches to instruction and learning. The courses selected for the program’s first round are Introductory Biology, Principles of Chemistry and the statistics course Data Analysis for the Health Sciences.

According to the Center for Teaching and Learning’s website, the Course Transformation Program “is a central element in President Powers’ campaign to make UT-Austin a leader in reinventing higher education for the 21st century.”

As part of the program, the University is redesigning eight to 10 large enrollment lower-division courses, which are assisted by curriculum, instructional technology and learning assessment specialists from the teaching and learning center.

The Course Transformation Program uses advanced instructional technologies to support and enhance teaching and learning. One goal is for these introductory courses to shed light on areas in which students have insufficient background from their high school courses and to thus make the learning process more interactive, provide students with more opportunities to assess their own progress and give faculty more immediate feedback on how well students are learning.

“In time, we expect to see an increase in the number of our students who go on to become nurses, pharmacists, dentists, doctors, science teachers and public health professionals,” Ritter said in an press release announcing the program.

The popularization of this book may not start a revolution in course re-invigoration, but it could lead bright young high school seniors to think a little more critically once they enter college next fall.

Currently, more than 80,000 bartenders, 18,000 parking lot attendants and 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees. All told, some 17 million Americans with higher education degrees are doing jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

It appears that college students dedicate four years of their young lives to become experts in a chosen field, only to find themselves adrift after receiving their degrees. As the authors of “Academically Adrift” advise, students — with the leadership of their instructors — may need to take responsibility for their own educations, or they may join the other millions of Americans waiting for their big breaks.