In 2011, Richard Arum’s and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift revealed that many students go through four (or five or six) years of college without realizing any gains in learning or critical thinking skills. The book sparked a national debate about the value of college degrees and the role higher education should play in preparing students for jobs. Today, that book’s follow-up, Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, was released by the University of Chicago Press.
Aspiring Adults Adrift tracks many of the same individuals analyzed by Arum and Roksa in 2011. It highlights how many of those graduates are experiencing unemployment and underemployment woes, still living with and relying on parents, and delaying starting families. An Inside Higher Ed review of the book can be found here.
Arum and Roksa emphasize that colleges and universities are largely to blame for those graduates’ problems, as they have, over the years, adopted an approach that focuses more on building fancy amenities and enhancing students’ non-academic experiences than on improving educational standards and increasing coursework rigor.