Monica Potts asks whether pushing higher education for everyone is actually making it tougher for poor students to enter the middle class.
But when talking about expanding access to college and increasing the number of Americans with degrees, it’s useful to ask, to paraphrase another president: “Is our children learning?” According to a new study by two sociologists, the answer for students enrolled in college is “No, not really.” The researchers — Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia — tested 2,300 students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities and found they didn’t do much better on measures of critical and analytic reasoning after four years than when they started.
