Are college students learning?

And we now have some alarming national data to suggest the answer: not nearly enough. My New York University colleague Richard Arum and the University of Virginia’s Josipa Roksa recently tracked several thousand undergraduates as they moved through two dozen U.S. universities. They found that almost half of them didn’t significantly improve their reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. And after four years, subsequent research showed, more than one-third of students still showed no significant gains in these areas…

College students spend about 12 hours a week studying, on average, and one-third of them report studying less than five hours per week. More than half the students in Arum and Roksa’s sample said they had not taken a single class in the semester before they were surveyed that required a total of 20 pages of writing.