Posting at Jay Greene’s blog, Sandra Stotsky sheds light on the reasons that many college students, as Arum and Roksa have found, don’t learn much. She points to the mania for “attainment,” especially among minority students. Here’s a key paragraph:

While early advocates of “equal educational opportunities” wanted more poor students reaching high academic goals, not a change in these goals, supporters of the goal of social justice were quick to see an idiosyncratic and shrunken secondary curriculum (as content-free as possible), accompanied by changes in pedagogical practices and classroom organization, as a quicker means to their desired ends. If academic credentials (i.e., a college degree) are what promote social mobility, then what needed fairer distribution to get low-achieving groups moving upward were the credentials, not necessarily what they were designed to reflect.