What are people learning in college?

I've seen a number of articles lately with titles like Study shows limited learning in college, but studying alone and more reading and writing helps. What's the argument made in them? That a study

... of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 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 [of college].

Do I agree? In some ways yes and in some ways no.

One way in which I disagree is the manner in which their study appears to be focused on a liberal arts approach to school, which may not match the effort required of all disciplines. For example:

One problem is that students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." 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.

Here I'm interpreting "writing" to mean essays submitted, which may not match the mode of engagement required of a particular discipline. In many sciences, you might have some brief lab reports to submit but I'm not quite sure how much writing would be involved. They're probably not too lengthy, and point form or a few sentences plus calcuations might suffice. Similarly regarding reading, how much might be demanded by some sciences. e.g. John Nash (founder of game theory, winner of the Nobel Prize [and the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind]) had a Ph.D. thesis 27 pages in length. In science, you can convey a lot of complex material oftentimes in relatively little space - but that little bit of reading can take a lot to comprehend. As they explicitly note a computer science example of not having had to write a lot of papers, they definitely don't seem to be applying different techniques to evaluate the art and humanities versus the sciences.

University of Missouri freshman Julia Rheinecker, who said her first semester of college largely duplicated the work she completed back home in southern Illinois.

First you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them? That's typically the suggested method of writing presentations - did they go into any more depth in analysis even while covering similar subjects?

-Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two.

This also means that 64 percent did demonstrate significant improvement (although I'm not quite sure what counts as "significant")

Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains. ... Social engagement generally does not help student performance. Students who spent more time studying with peers showed diminishing growth

There's a lot of fluffy disciplines being introduced, so I'm not surprised to see that the old core disciplines proceed better results.

I was more interested in that second bit. Despite all the attempts institutions seem to be doing to increase groupwork, it doesn't seem to be producing the best results. Then again, at an undergraduate level this may be another science versus the arts and humanities issue - this time favouring the sciences.

Despite the criticisms outlined above, I do think that there's a lot of dogmatism in a lot of academia these days though. I kind of enjoy shows like The Colbert Report, but although this show is a satire I wonder for just how many this is about the depth of their exposure to other points of view. To learn well, it seems that you need to encounter and attempt to address the best arguments of those who disagree with you - something that definitely has been missing at times from some of the classes that I've taken, particularly as concerns contemporary social issues.