Aspiring Adults Adrift
MLA Citation: Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. The University of Chicago Press, 2014.
This book is about the failings of undergraduate education that shape an individual's adulthood. The educational path that a student choses to pursue in college will affect if they have a delayed transition into adulthood. With the privatization of college education today, colleges have become more focused on social engagement than catering to their students well-being, increasing the chances of "emerging adulthood" post-graduation. Although these students do not have a clear picture of their futures, they are all optimistic that their college degree will help them later on in life.
The authors of Aspiring Adults Adrift are Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Richard Arum is an American Sociologist of Education who specializes in school discipline and inequality in higher education. He studied political science during his undergraduate education at Tufts University, he also received a M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Berkley. Josipa Roksa is a professor of Sociology and Education and The University of Virginia. She has focused her studies on the inequalities of learning outcomes amongst students. Both Arum and Roksa have written another book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, about the undergraduate experience and the impact it has on a student's education.
Key Terms:
- Emerging Adults: graduate college students who only partially transition into traditional adult roles after college due to their delayed-adulthood and lack of career motivation
- Academically Adrift: students who are more focused on the other aspects of college such as social activities and extracurricular than they are on their academics
- Academic Engagement: how much effort and time a student puts into their schoolwork outside the classroom
Quotes From Book:
"If one takes selective attrition into account, student gains were actually larger earlier in their college careers" (Arum & Roksa 38).
"Institutions make resource allocation decisions based on what will entice seventeen year-old high school seniors to apply and enroll...Once students are enrolled, institutions give them broad latitude to choose their own course of study while failing to impose rigorous academic standards and leaving their social behavior largely unregulated" (Arum & Roksa 120).
"There is a clear need for a focused effort to overcome the lack of comparative assessments of learning outcomes at the program (major/discipline) level. When joined with existing assessments of learning at the core skills level, such assessments would provide a basis for the use of learning outcomes to inform policy decision-making" (Arum & Roksa 126).
Value:
This book gives a more detailed view on the post-graduation effects that being "academically adrift" during college has on an individual in their future. I can use this information to look deeper into the impact that being undecided has on an individual's career path and the pursuits and attitudes of students enter after graduation. I found that it was important to include the second quote because it brings up the point that colleges operate as if they were businesses, and are focused on what will bring in the most revenue. This results in a lack of personalized attention towards students educational goals which can set undecided students in particular backwards because they do not have someone to provide them with necessary information.
This is very good, and a great lit review. I think the issue of "emerging adulthood" (which is the optimistic term -- the more pessimistic being "delayed adulthood") is really useful for you, and it might be at least a part of your argument -- that students who have difficulty deciding on a major are likely to also take a while to establish themselves in careers. Some see this as the extension of the "liminal" period of college into the traditional age of adulthood, and some students go on to graduate school as part of the process of discovering their career path, which literally extends the college "liminal" period. What those who prefer the term "emerging adulthood" emphasize, though, is that this "liminal" period is potentially transformative and allows those who go through it to discover, independently, who they are and what they want to do with their lives, which can lead to long term happiness if they succeed. The danger, though, is that they will be missing out on earnings while also facing the possibility of long term student debt (exacerbated by extra years to finish undergrad and possibly years in grad school). So while they might discover, in the end, what they really want to do with their lives, they may not be able to afford to do it!
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