This article, written by David Brooks is discussing the amount of money colleges are charging, but the benefit these schools are providing is not clear. The impressiveness comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, and the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. He states that colleges are supposed to produce learning. In the study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard arum and Jospa Roksa found that, most of the time, students experienced a pitiful seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years on college and a slight gain in the two years after that. This study suggests that just about half of the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college. There was another study which found that student motivation actually declines over the first year in college. Also, according to surveys of employers, only a small amount of college graduates have the writing and thinking skills required to do their jobs. Colleges today are definitely less demanding. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying. Today’s students spend about half of that time. Colleges are going to start being tested to find out how they are doing. They are going to do this through value-added assessments.
This is most definitely a social problem. There are colleges all over the world charging students thousands upon thousands of dollars to attend their school, and the students are not even benefiting from it. Eventually, parents are going to decide not to pay the high prices if all their children get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. The point of going to school to obtain a higher education degree is to receive a good quality education, and students today are not getting that. I think that value added assessments could help this problem. We have talked a lot about this is one of my teaching classes. Value added assessments would be able to provide prospective parents with information that will give them some sense of how much their students are learning. If students attending certain schools are not learning hardly anything, then this could prevent some parents from spending an abundance of money at schools that are not going to be beneficial to their students. Value added assessments will be able to give everyone the information they need to know on how colleges are actually doing. Parents could possibly save money on their child’s education, and their child could receive an overall higher quality education than at the overly expensive universities.
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