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Newly-minted college graduates: "They're getting hammered"
That is the verdict of sociologists Richard Arum from New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia in a recent interview with the New York Times. The details are grim. After tracking a cohort of 2,300 students who started college in fall 2005 and graduated in spring 2009, they report that 36% have moved back home with their parents, almost one-tenth carry over $60,000 in debt. It gets worse: two-thirds earn less than $35,000 and 45% earn less than $15,000.
This is not just a story of the recession and its victims: it is also a kind of morality play in which the actors can affect the outcomes. Arum and Roksa used instruments like the Collegiate Learning Assessment to measure growth in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. They note, "large numbers [of students] don't seem to be learning very much." And a very interesting coincidence: "Employed graduates tended to have not only higher grade-point averages, but also higher test scores." Arum and Roksa have suggested elsewhere, based on significant amounts of data, that academic programs in mathematics, science, social science, and the humanities contribute far more to students' intellectual growth than such majors as education and communication. ACTA also believes that there is a very high face validity between a solid core curriculum and cognitive growth in the skills students need for career success like mathematics, scientific thought, effective writing, foreign language. That is why we have graded nearly 720 colleges and universities on their core curricula in the WhatWillTheyLearn.com project and urge college bound students and their parents to choose colleges based on curricular quality .
Posted by Michael Poliakoff on January 12, 2011 at January 12, 2011 10:47 AM
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