Former Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes scholar, admits that over the course of the 20 years she has served on selection committees for the Rhodes Scholarship she has “become increasingly concerned … about the education American universities are providing” in this Washington Post op-ed, and speculates that “our universities have yielded to the pressure of parents who pay high tuition and expect students, above all else, to be prepared for the jobs they will try to secure after graduation”:

Unlike many graduate fellowships, the Rhodes seeks leaders who will "fight the world's fight." They must be more than mere bookworms. We are looking for students who wonder, students who are reading widely, students of passion who are driven to make a difference in the lives of those around them and in the broader world through enlightened and effective leadership. The undergraduate education they are receiving seems less and less suited to that purpose.

An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral. A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn't seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn't seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America's Constitution.

When asked what are the important things for a leader to be able to do, one young applicant described some techniques and personal characteristics to manage a group and get a job done. Nowhere in her answer did she give any hint of understanding that leaders decide what job should be done. Leaders set agendas. …

Our great universities … are producing top students who have given very little thought to matters beyond their impressive grasp of an intense area of study.

A new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.", which contends that nearly half (45 percent) of students “show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years,” confirms Wilson’s observations. The Associated Press reports:

Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The study, an unusually large-scale effort to track student learning over time, comes as the federal government, reformers and others argue that the U.S. must produce more college graduates to remain competitive globally. But if students aren't learning much that calls into question whether boosting graduation rates will provide that edge.

The book is based on information from 24 schools [involving more than 2,300 undergraduates], meant to be a representative sample, which provided Collegiate Learning Assessment data on students who took the standardized test in their first semester in fall 2005 and at the end of their sophomore years in spring 2007. The schools took part on the condition that their institutions not be identified. …

Lindsay McCluskey, president of the United States Student Association, said the findings speak to a larger problem in U.S. higher education: universities being run more like corporations than educational institutions, with students viewed as consumers who come for a degree and move on.

"There is less personal attention in the classroom, fewer tenure-track positions, and more classes are being taught by teaching assistants and in some cases undergraduate students," said McCluskey, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Obviously, that has an impact on our learning and the experience we get in college."

The New York Times assembled a panel to discuss the findings by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia in "Academically Adrift." Here’s a summary:

† C. Kent McGuire, former dean of the Temple University College of Education and president of the Southern Education Foundation:  Today’s student lives in a world of hyper-connectivity and information exchange. They receive their information in five-minute episodes and it comes in many modalities - sound, text, video. The typical college classroom is a stand and deliver environment that does not foster engagement, interaction or exchange. … Setting aside the most selective schools and colleges, many fewer students are full-time. … [Many] work while attending school and have competing responsibilities at home. … [W]e are working increasingly with students who face competing demands for their time and attention.

† Gaye Tuchman, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and author of "Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University": Colleges have become economic engines where students, burdened by debt, just want to make money. … “Why are you here?” I ask [the 325 students who now populate my classroom]. “To get a better job,” they tell me. It’s a reasonable answer from in-state undergraduates paying as much as $25,000. … The students have changed, too. National statistics announce that they are from less wealthy backgrounds and borrow to pay tuition that (at public colleges) was once free; more of them graduate with a larger debt than the undergraduates of previous years.

† Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra: High school graduates - a rapidly dwindling elite - come to college entirely unaccustomed to close reading, habits of disciplined analysis, skills in writing reasoned arguments and a basic grasp of the conduct, methods and purposes of science.  … All many of them know is rote learning, and fear of mediocre standardized tests and grades. No vital connection between learning and life has been forged in our schools, much less any affection for voluntarily using one’s mind in the rigorous, sustained and frequently counterintuitive way that leads to innovation and the advancement of knowledge. But our colleges and universities do pitifully little about combating student passivity and absence of curiosity. Some institutions are too proud to develop serious programs of remediation.

† Sean Decatur, dean of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College, and a member of the board of trustees of the Association of American Colleges and Universities: [T]wo interesting and significant findings from this study lie just below the results that have garnered sensational headlines: students who take traditional liberal arts and science courses fare better in terms of the increase in skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment than students who take undergraduate course in more pre-professional fields; and courses demanding more work from students (for example, courses with larger quantities of reading or writing required) tend to raise learning more. … As policymakers continue to search for means to make higher education a driver for entrepreneurial innovation and economic transformation, they should not lose sight of the central value of the traditional liberal arts and sciences – topics all too often overlooked in favor of applied or pre-professional fields – in the development of the student mind.

† Philip Babcock, assistant professor of economics at University of California, Santa Barbara, who recently issued a report on the decline in studying time among college students with Mindy Marks, an economist at the University of California, Riverside: Full-time college students in the 1960s studied 24 hours per week, on average, whereas their counterparts today study 14 hours per week. The 10-hour decline is visible for students from all demographic groups and of all cognitive abilities, in every major and at every type of college. … Put simply, thinking requires effort. If colleges no longer require this kind of effort, how could students hope to acquire these skills and how could colleges hope to instill them?

† Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University and the author of "Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities" : Far too many come to college today less well prepared than in the past and are not able to work at the level that should be required of them. It is essential to develop an approach to reform that integrates K-12 and college education. … The challenges students face are compounded by pressures faculty members face. … Growing financial problems make it virtually impossible to provide the kind of education students deserve. While faculty members and graduate students are being cut, many schools are trying to increase income by admitting more students.

† George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy: Owing to the generally weak state of K-12 schooling, most high school graduates are not accustomed to serious academic work. They enroll in college with the expectation that it will be a continuation of K-12, that is, undemanding. … At many colleges and universities, students who are academically weak and disengaged constitute the bulk of the student body, enjoying themselves at the expense of their families and taxpayers. Wishing to keep such “students” happy and enrolled, many schools have acquiesced in or even encouraged the faculty to lower academic standards. High grades are encouraged lest students get angry and drop out when graded on their true performance. .. And in the mistaken notion that the country needs to have far more people going through college, the federal government is making it easier for students to borrow the money for it. Consequently, we will lure more marginal students into college, further increasing the pressure to lower standards. It has been accurately said that college is the new high school; the way we are going, soon it will be the new middle school.

Thinking back on her own public school education, The Stiletto finds merit in many of these criticisms. She is a firm believer in rote learning and drills in elementary school to imbed basic math, spelling and grammatical skills that are the foundation of understanding more complex concepts underlying, for instance, algebra and writing a persuasive essay. As The Stiletto has previously pointed out (second item), elementary schools have long been in the grip of such pedagogic fads as “whole word” reading and “new math,” so students arrive at middle school, unprepared for the next step in their intellectual development: analysis and problem solving. Ditto high school and college – where students are not taught how to think, but what to think (second item) by their liberal activist teachers and professors.

Editorial Note: The Stiletto did not have the luxury that far too many other students have of “enjoying themselves at the expense of their families and taxpayers,” because she put herself through college and graduate school (working after school to get her baccalaureate and going to school after work to get her Master’s). Knowing how many hours of work each credit cost her was a powerful incentive to get the most out of her investment in her future.

Life Imitates “Sleeper”: Part II

Health food store owner Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) is accidentally cryopreserved and revived 200 years later in the year 2173, when scientists have learned that 20^th century nutritional advice was exactly backwards (video).

- “Sleeper,” Woody Allen, December, 17, 1973

Dietary Guidelines Call For More Exercise, Less Food

- The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011

[A] European study into diet and health looking at 300,000 people in eight countries … found that people who ate eight or more portions of fresh food a day had a 22 per cent lower chance of dying from heart disease. Yet just 1,636 participants died during the study from heart disease, which is about half of one per cent, reports The Daily Mail of London:

Out of that very small proportion, fewer people died from the group that ate more fruit and veg. …

This survey comes not long after another large study, which examined half a million people over eight years, reported that fruit and veg offer no protection against breast, prostate, bowel, lung or any other kind of tumour. Those eating the most fruit and veg showed no difference in cancer risk compared with those ­eating the least. …

You might assume our five-a-day ­fixation is based on firm evidence. But you’d be wrong.

It started as a marketing campaign dreamt up by around 20 fruit and veg ­companies and the U.S. National Cancer Institute at a meeting in California in 1991. And it’s been remarkably successful.

If This Is Just A Dream, The Stiletto Does Not Want To Wake Up: Part V

A recent rat study finds that animals exercising more drink more alcohol, and a large-scale public health study finds that people drinking more alcohol exercise more (“heavy drinkers exercise about 10 more minutes per week than current moderate drinkers and about 20 more minutes per week than current abstainers”). And according to the book “Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine,” scientific studies show that "... alcohol does many things to the brain, one thing it clearly doesn't do is wipe out neurons indiscriminately" – meaning drinking is not toxic to brain cells.

[Hat Tip: New York’s Grub Street blog]