The first two years at college are less about book knowledge and more about carnal knowledge, these days. College instructors care less about teaching then about putting an academic feather into their elitist hats. Respect and research dollars come to the academics who publish not to those who teach disinterested students.

This toxic brew of booze and self interest results in stupider college students (and poorer parents).

USA Today reports the shocking findings:

Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Findings are based on transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.

After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.

Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.

[Cross posted at Liberty Pundits]

The real problems with higher education aren’t even being addressed by this article (Glenn Reynolds has done a superb job on the issue):

1. Most jobs requiring a college degree shouldn’t.
2. Most kids in college shouldn’t be there and would fail if there were any academic standards (and do fail even with the lack of them).
3. College education in anything but the hard sciences is a waste.
4. Colleges actively pursue and harm young Americans by saddling them with obscene debt for an often useless product.
5. Colleges deceive young people with funding deals that help the college administrators.
6. College tuition is inflated by government subsidies. If the Federal government didn’t up their loan amounts, colleges would be forced to cut costs.
7. The federal government should not be encouraging kids to take on bad debt and subsidizing this behavior.

Not only does college dumb down kids, they’re paying an astronomical amount of money to get dumber.

Parents need to heavily consider whether college is a good investment for their children.