Preparation for Citizenship...

That is the title of Ch. 7 in Derek Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges. I am beginning to feel a little frustrated.... some fallacies of composition are troubling me. Colleges aren't doing enough to promote good citizenship; college education is key; more college education for citizenship would promote better citizenship. But, gee, over the last 40 years vastly more Americans have gone to college, yet Bok's empirical assessment of citizenship is that there isn't enough. So... perhaps college education (no matter how much citizenship training is or is not involved) actually has little to do with citizenship outcomes. The problem is also that the outcome of interest is not carefully defined in a measurable way. Evoking Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone-- there Putnam selected a group of civic indicators important in the past and showed how they had declined. Selecting civic activities that were unimportant in the past would (more likely) mean that they had now increased.

Also, I am concerned about the general paradox of the book so far (remember, though, I skipped the intro and am digesting the marinated tofu). Bok so far has been nicely consistent- every chapter shows that the outcome is not improving, and every chapter shows the scientific studies about how the outcome might be improved. But there is no comparative assessment (maybe later?). In other words, we seem to be heading in the direction of having ten things that can be improved (all with associated costs) but little sense of which things are most cost effective. Is there are bigger bang for the buck in preparing for citizenship, or preparing for diversity? So far Bok seems to be saying that the bangs are all positive. but the magnitudes matter much.

I say this noting that the first such assessment enters the stage as a throwaway comment on p. 188: "It is surely odd to require all students to take courses in the sciences or study a foreign language while taking no steps to ensure that they have enough knowledge to understand the basic problems and processes of their democracy." A truism, but Bok aspires to more. He would be the first to say that colleges have indeed taken many steps, so it is not about "no steps" but about "more steps." It is fair to ask whether there scientific evidence that it is "odd."