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The CLA Longitudinal Study tracked a group of over 2,000 young adults as they made their way through college and transitioned into the labor force and graduate school. It examined the extent to which these students developed generic competencies over the course of their college career, and whether these competencies were related to their chances of making successful transitions to adulthood after graduation. Co-directed by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the project examined patterns of student learning by looking at the links between individual experiences; institutional contexts; and the development of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills, as measured by the CLA.
The study culminated in multiple findings and policy reports, which analyzed CLA data from over 2,300 students at 24 four-year higher education institutions. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses is based on the first phase of the project. Findings from phase 2 are presented in a U.S. Department of Education policy report: Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations. The third phase of the study tracked a subsample of the same group of students as they transitioned from college to the workforce or graduate school. The analysis illuminated how various factors, including higher-order skills, influence graduates’ life course outcomes. Findings were discussed in the report Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort. In 2014, Arum published Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates in The University of Chicago Press, based on phases 2 and 3 of the project.
Overall, the longitudinal study had important implications for policy, practice and research, suggesting the need to focus future social policy not just on increasing access to college and reducing student attrition, but also on assuring success in terms of learning for students attending higher education institutions. Institutions varied tremendously on the extent to which students attending them demonstrated growth on CLA performance. Arum's research also identified groups of students who had entered higher education from disadvantaged backgrounds and examined how they progressed in postsecondary institutions over time. Apart from disadvantaged backgrounds, there were a myriad of factors associated with the gaps in longitudinal growth, including high school preparation, individual-level college experience, and institutional differences.
On Academically Adrift and the CLA Longitudinal Study
"It's hard to think of a study in the last decade that has had a bigger impact on public discourse about higher education and the internal workings of college and universities alike than has Academically Adrift."
— Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Education
"A damning indictment of the American higher education system."
— Chronicle of Higher Education
“This might be the most important book on higher education in a decade . . . In this new era of college for all, their analysis refocuses our attention on higher education’s fundamental goals.”
— James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University
“Before reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job.”
— Bill Gates, The Gates Notes
“In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become."
— Anthony Grafton, The New York Review of Books
"This provocative study demands attention at all levels, including leaders of higher education, researchers, students, parents, and the general public. It confirms that students who encounter faculty with high expectations and demanding courses tend to learn more than others. Among its most troubling findings are the persistent racial gaps in learning rates during college. The implications of these and other findings should be widely discussed."
— Adam Gamoran, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"God bless Richard Arum for taking this on.”
— Former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
Measuring College Learning (MCL) Project
The MCL project began in 2013 as an opportunity to engage faculty and the broader higher education community in an effort to develop tools to understand and improve discipline-specific student learning. Faculty are often absent in policy debates about student learning, and past attempts to articulate and demonstrate learning have focused on generic competencies, not discipline-specific learning that occurs in students’ majors. In the MCL project, faculty and experts came together to consider what students should learn in their majors and how that learning should be measured.
When the MCL project was active, it generated resources that supported productive department- and discipline-level efforts to articulate goals for student learning and measure students’ progress toward those goals. It also built resources that served to facilitate fruitful dialogues between faculty and employers, who had a mutual interest in preparing students for the workforce. Initial funding for the business, biology, communication, economics, and sociology strands was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Based on the MCL project and its national, multidisciplinary effort to define and measure learning outcomes, the book Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century, co-authored by Richard Arum, Amanda Cook, and Josipa Roksa, became accessible in 2016. The publication offered a path forward to improving the quality of undergraduate education; it emphasized the importance of prioritizing higher-order competencies and disciplinarily grounded conceptual understandings of learning goals. The work encouraged faculty to be central to supporting greater student outcomes.
Research Alliance for New York City Schools
Research Alliance for New York City Schools
As Program Director of Education Research at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Richard Arum led a collaborative effort between 2006-2008 that brought together two dozens academic researchers from Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York, Princeton and the State University of New York to articulate a concept paper on the need to develop infrastructure to support independent research on New York City schools. Arum recruited and brought together diverse stakeholders (including Chancellor Joel Klein, teacher union president Randi Weingarten, business leaders, community groups, educational researchers and funders); raised $5 million of external start-up funding from approximately a dozen leading foundations; recruited Jim Kemple from MDRC to serve as executive director of the center; and successfully launched the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. The Research Alliance – loosely modeled on the Chicago Consortium for School Research – organizes and integrates longitudinal dataset from New York City’s public schools, conducts rigorous research on important education related issues, and disseminates findings to a wide range of audiences.
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