Academically adrift

A University of Colorado at Boulder student wanted to make a point, so he paid his college tuition in cash — more than $14,000 in one-dollar bills:

Nic Ramos might be onto something, showing kids what the parents (much of the time) have to pony up for a semester at college.

“The sacrifices that my family is willing to make for me to go to school and be happy,” said in the video. “I know that I always appreciated it and all those things but this just put it into a whole new perspective when i could physically see that sacrifice.”

So what does that money — or more accurately, twice that amount — buy? For many students: Nothing, a new study says.

In a book released this week (Academically Adrift) sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, found that in a study of 2,000 students’ performances standardized test three times during their college careers, almost half showed no gains after two years and only a little over a third showed nothing gained after four years.

Update 2:54 p.m. – MPR’s Midmorning will discuss the issue with the book’s authors next Monday morning.