Still, Arum and Roksa believe that some things do make a difference. First of all, students who are better prepared academically for college not only do better when they get to college; they improve more markedly while they’re there. And students who take courses requiring them to write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty pages a week show greater improvement.
The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.
Thanks, Brian. I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the spate of articles talking about the monetary value of a college degree, which I feel has really denigrated the innate value of learning, and the inherent qualities of intellectual rigor. Not that I think college/university is the only place you can learn how to be an intellectual thoughtful person, but it really bums me out that that doesn’t even seem to figure into the equation lately when talking about why we go to school.
