College is what you make of it

Is college worth it?

If I had a dollar for every time I read a headline with those four words in it, I might be able to pay for a semester’s worth of tuition.It’s a legitimate question, though, and one all of us should ask ourselves.

As tuition rises and the job market remains in disarray, high school and college students should think about what they want out of college and whether colleges can really offer it to them. A new book that came out earlier this year suggests if you don’t have any initiative, or aren’t willing to apply yourself, college probably isn’t worth it.

“Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is the culmination of a four-year study that followed 2,300 students at 24 colleges and universities across the country. The study found that of the students surveyed, more than a third saw no improvement in critical thinking throughout their entire tenure in college.

Why did the students learn so little? Well, the study also found that students aren’t studying much: 35 percent of students said they studied on average less than five hours a week, and 50 percent said they didn’t have a course that required 20 pages of writing in their previous semester.

According to the study, students today are studying half as much as students did decades ago. In my opinion, much of the blame for this falls on the universities. They are making it easy for us to indulge in laziness by failing to demand that students study more. Professors have become slaves to the course evaluation and the “everybody is an A student” culture, which results in grade inflation. At IU the average student GPA has risen from 2.83 in 1976 to 3.16 in fall 2010, and an A is the most common grade received. Last fall, 91,586 A’s were given, 61,495 B’s and 20,556 C’s.

Students at IU today can get a B for performing C work, and pass a class with an effort level that 25 years ago would have earned them a failing grade. Not every student should be an A student. Those who receive an A should be the best of the best — la creme de la creme.

The highest grade should signal excellence, encouraging students to work harder to make themselves more attractive to employers and anyone else who values high achievement. However, as the grade distribution suggests, an A has become the norm.

If everyone is an A student, where does this leave room for improvement? If you can get an A with minimal effort, where is the incentive to try harder, to push your limits, to really learn and develop intellectual skills along the way?

Absent an alternative way to recognize excellence, the university offers no such incentive. So, if you want to get anything out of college, you’re going to have to expect more of yourself than your professors do. You’re going to have to put in your own effort and find your own measures of improvement.

And this gets us back to our main point: Is college worth it? Employers recognize that students are coming out of college ill-prepared to enter the workforce. The supposedly “better” colleges and universities say they place more emphasis on critical thinking than teaching students job market skills, such as web development, IT training and graphic design. So, they build curricula around courses that are meant to improve writing and argument development.

Yet, as “Academically Adrift” suggests, they are not even doing a good job at that. What we have, then, is a university culture that doesn’t prepare students to meet the demands of the job market or one that encourages students to improve their basic cognitive abilities.

College is worth it if the return is greater than the investment. Is it worth four, six, or eight years of your life, as well as all the expense? About 40 percent of our students graduate in four years. And more than half of college students nationwide finish in six years, according to a 2010 study by the United States Department of Education.

As total student loan debt crosses the $1 trillion mark, students are still running to banks and the government to take out loans. Students are putting in a huge amount of time and money to buy little more than hope and opportunity, attending institutions that do not always provide the intellectual enrichment they promise.

It should be no surprise, then, when they cannot find a job and have trouble paying off their debts. If you want to make sure you get a return on your investment and assure yourself that college is worth it, ask yourself, “Will I be able to take the initiative and expect more of myself?” God knows the university won’t be doing that for you.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu