Aspiring Adults Adrift ─ Tentative Transitions of College Graduates

Aspiring Adults is the much-anticipated follow-up study to our 2011 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the book that took higher education by storm. Using data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the authors argued in AA that the majority of college students don’t learn much in their first two years of college. The authors published the more quantitative parts of this follow-up study with a free online publication. Aspiring Adults, then, is the trade version of their findings, replete with a good amount of qualitative material from many interviews with students.The authors document how recent college graduates attempted to make post-college transitions from the spring of 2009 through the summer of 2011, during a particularly difficult period for the U.S. economy. They found a high level of variability in graduates’ employment outcomes, living arrangements, relationships, and levels of civic engagement, and they describe how colleges and universities are implicated in shaping the lives of these young adults. Arum and Roksa provide a rich description of how students’ lives varied during and after college as well as how these patterns corresponded with the general collegiate skills individuals left college with as well as the majors they chose and the institutions they attended.

Richard Arum is professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University and senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Josipa Roksa is associate professor of sociology and education and Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the University of Virginia.