Description
Aspiring Adults is the much-anticipated follow-up study to our 2011 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the book that took higher education by storm. Using data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the authors argued in AA that the majority of college students don’t learn much in their first two years of college. The authors published the more quantitative parts of this follow-up study with a free online publication. Aspiring Adults, then, is the trade version of their findings, replete with a good amount of qualitative material from many interviews with students.The authors document how recent college graduates attempted to make post-college transitions from the spring of 2009 through the summer of 2011, during a particularly difficult period for the U.S. economy. They found a high level of variability in graduates’ employment outcomes, living arrangements, relationships, and levels of civic engagement, and they describe how colleges and universities are implicated in shaping the lives of these young adults. Arum and Roksa provide a rich description of how students’ lives varied during and after college as well as how these patterns corresponded with the general collegiate skills individuals left college with as well as the majors they chose and the institutions they attended.
Read More
Few books have ever made their presence felt on college campuses'and newspaper opinion pages'as quickly and thoroughly as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's 2011 landmark study of undergraduates' learning, socialization, and study habits, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. From the moment it was published, one thing was clear: no university could afford to ignore its well-documented and disturbing findings about the failings of undergraduate education. Now Arum and Roksa are back, and their new book follows the same cohort of undergraduates through the rest of their college careers and out into the working world. Built on interviews and detailed surveys of almost a thousand recent college graduates from a diverse range of colleges and universities, Aspiring Adults Adrift reveals a generation facing a difficult transition to adulthood. Recent graduates report trouble finding decent jobs and developing stable romantic relationships, as well as assuming civic and financial responsibility'yet at the same time, they remain surprisingly hopeful and upbeat about their prospects. Analyzing these findings in light of students' performance on standardized tests of general collegiate skills, selectivity of institutions attended, and choice of major, Arum and Roksa not only map out the current state of a generation too often adrift, but enable us to examine the relationship between college experiences and tentative transitions to adulthood. Sure to be widely discussed, Aspiring Adults Adrift will compel us once again to re-examine the aims, approaches, and achievements of higher education.
Read Less