Columbia University Report Says “Academically Adrift” is Wrong. Right? No, Wrong.

You can read about the report from Columbia’s “College Educational Quality Project” here: http://chronicle.com/article/A-New-Kind-of-Study-Seeks-to/144621/#disqus_thread

The report says it examined “educational rigor” and “teaching quality” to reach its conclusion, which you can read about in my comment below.

I commented with what I thought about their conclusion:

“The “College Educational Quality (CEQ) Project at Teachers College, Columbia University”, reports that “…college education…is certainly not in crisis (as suggested by Arum and Roksa’s (2011) Academically Adrift)…”

The New York Times reports that “…even some of the country’s most prestigious programs have room for improvement. For example..one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia University…were given low marks [on New York City’s scorecard for teacher-preperation] for how much they were able to improve student test scores…” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08…

There seem to be other “educational quality” issues at Columbia: they are not in the top 50 schools in producing graduates who go on to a STEM PhD (See Are Some US News Top Ranked Schools Not Really Preparing STEM Grads Well? on my blog inside-higher-ed.com); they guarantee admission to their 3-2 engineering program to students from 102 schools – as long as the students maintained 3.0 gpa and just passed their STEM courses at their own institutions. (See Columbia University – Another 3-2 Program Like Wash. U.’s? on my blog.)

So, do we accept Columbia’s assesment of Arum and Roksa’s work? or, Arum and Roksa’s assessment of how well universities are teaching and with how much rigor?”