Are colleges to blame for what happened to the class of 2009? A study of more than 1,000 members of that graduating class from 25 selective colleges found that two years after graduation, one-quarter of them were still living at home. Thirteen percent had jobs that didn’t require any college education. Most were still getting some kind of financial help from their parents.
Those sobering findings are from two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, who began studying the students not long after they entered college. In 2010, they published a book called Academically Adrift, arguing that colleges were paying too much attention to keeping students happy and too little attention to developing their critical thinking, reasoning, and writing skills.
