According to Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s latest book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, college kids are doing remarkably well these days at — as their title suggests — not learning much of anything. This study doesn’t mean that in the sense that these students are filled with inane information such as an ability to recite the first 24 lines of “The Canterbury Tales” from memory. Rather, it means college students are literally taking away next to nothing from their “higher” educations.

The book traces the progress (or lack thereof) of 2,300 college students at a wide variety of four-year colleges and universities. The students were required to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a test designed to measure “key higher order competencies” such as critical thinking, analytic deduction, etc.) before and during their college educations. The results… well, they’re less than impressive:

• 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college.
• 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” over four years of college.

Furthermore, students only improved, on average of “0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years” meaning that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of his or her class would move up to the 68th percentile four years later but “that’s the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven’t experienced any college learning” (emphasis very appropriately added).

So, who, or what, is to blame? Arum and Roska posit that it is a lack of rigor that is holding students back. In data taken from student surveys, “32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don’t take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester.” Additionally, on average, students spend a maximum of 14 hours a week studying and that is primarily in group settings.

Given this scenario, the authors make a strong case that students should be encouraged — well, forced — to work harder and should not focus so much on the social, non-academic, experiences of college life: “Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.” The students who got the most out of their college education were those who spent time studying alone and pursuing more intense and difficult classes.

These suggestions are hardly groundbreaking or radical new thought, but it is nice to now have a study that backs up the choices some of us bookworms made in college. (You see mom, I may have damaged my eyes by spending too much time in a dimly lit library and never been free to talk on the phone, but at least I got something more out of my college experience than a bunch of facebook photos I’ve got to hide from future employers!)

“Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour;” etc.