Literature Review 3

 
     Authors Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum have written about the quality of college education in  "Academically Adrift". Together, they tackle the problems of current-day college students' struggles when dealing with the transition into adulthood. Change is a magazine that deals with contemporary issues with higher education. Its writing is geared toward students and faculty members who are both educated and willing to learn about societies' patterns and problems in higher education.
     This reading does a good job of depicting the troubles of college graduates and the reasons for them. It describes a study performed on college students who finished college "on time", which means within the four year time span, and searches to find what those students did with their lives two years after graduation. The shocking statistics show how graduating from college does not necessarily place a person in a guaranteed successful lifestyle. The study used the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) which measures the academic growth of a students through their skill levels in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. Students who performed in the top quintile of the CLA had more successful lives after two years of graduation. "Graduates who were highly academically engaged and demonstrated growth on the CLA task were slightly less likely to be unemployed than those who exhibited low levels of academic engagement/growth" (10). We are taught that the better we perform in school, the more successful we will be in our future. The CLA seems to support this statement. The bottom quintile had three times the chance of unemployment possibility when compared to the top quintile. College seniors of 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student-loan debt, which supports the thought brought up by the authors; "Debt has thus become a part of the American higher education land-scape" (10). Not surprisingly enough, 52% of students from highly educated families took out loans, compared to 75% from not highly educated families. The statistics show that "(students at the upper quintile of the CLA)..at the end of college faced much smoother transitions to adulthood" (14). This shows that rigorous college education should be enforced and raised at a higher standard to expect graduating college students to have successful lives. It will give them the right preparation for a successful future.
   This reading helps me explore my research question by providing me statistics that show how unprepared students are when they are released into the real world. The study on that group of students showed the importance of the CLA and the factor it plays in career development. It stated that about 2/3 of college graduates had borrowed money to pay for college, averaging a debt of $27,200. This debt, along with unsatisfactory education, is holding graduates back from entering adulthood.


Roksa, Josipa & Arum, Richard. "Life After College: The Challenging Transitions of the
          Academically Adrift Cohurt." Change. 2012: 8-14. Print.