As if Generation Y doesn’t have a bad enough reputation already. On Jan. 15, a book titled “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” revitalized the argument of whether or not college students are capable of making the most of their education. Allegedly, due to factors such as limited effort and decreased workload, the American school system is going down the drain – specifically when it comes to universities.
In some cases, this is true. According to a Jan. 25 New York Times article, the authors of “Academically Adrift” found that half of the surveyed students chose not to take classes requiring 20 pages of writing while one-third avoid classes with 40 pages of reading per week. The data was comprised of 2,300 students, enough to make a conclusive statement: some students take easy classes simply because they’re easy.
The study focuses on undergraduates in their first or second year, however, which gives it less credibility. Many colleges, including Boston University, make freshmen and sophomores focus on liberal arts courses in order to ensure that they have a “good foundation” as they enter into their specialties. It appears that this philosophy has backfired on administrators who are now collecting heat for their students’ less-than-satisfactory performance.
Liberal arts classes are the ultimate double-edged swords of degree programs. On the one hand, allowing students to take less intensive courses lets them explore what they’re interested in fresh out of high school. That way, they can gain a better understanding of what their schools offer in terms of majors. But such a generalized system has its negatives, the most daunting being the fact that it’s, well, easy to beat the system. Those who don’t view exploring as their main priority can breeze through with the slightest of ease.
Studies that continue to show the downward trend of colleges by no means reflect on students as a whole. Perhaps the authors of “Academically Adrift” are correct in one aspect: college students and colleges themselves are engaged in a struggle that doesn’t have an easy solution. Motivation can’t be imposed on those who lack it and school administrators can’t turn universities into trade schools. For now, scholars will simply have to work against the stereotype.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
