Additional research and data from Richard Arum, author of Academically Adrift, help confirm our research that males are not being treated equally in higher education.
Over the last few weeks, Dr. Arum has been kind enough to share some of his additional findings with NineShift. Arum's study is not primarily concerned with gender. But his data is important because it is one of the first studies to measure both learning and knowledge coming out of college (using the Collegiate Learning Assessment) and later work achievement and success.
As we all know, male students are given significantly worse grades in college than female students. Now we have more evidence that those grades are gender biased. Arum's study shows that male students were statistically as likely to be in the upper 20% of learners as females. And his study shows that males in that upper 20% of learners were as likely to be successful later as females.
More proof that keeping smart males out of college, failing to retain them, and giving them such lousy GPAs that they cannot get into graduate school is the primary source of our skilled worker shortage, the most serious issue we have in society right now.
Here's is a portion of Dr. Arum's communication with Nine Shift on his findings:
1) The relationship between GPA and CLA performance is not particularly strong in our data.
2) There were small differences by gender in our data (not likely statistically significant):
Bottom CLA quintile: women, 3.16; men, 3.10
Middle-3 CLA quintiles: women, 3.36; men, 3.31
Top CLA quintile: women, 3.52; men, 3.43
Numbers are GPA, once again demonstrating that males who learn as much and perform as well as females still get worse grades. Arum's study shows that students in the top quintile of college students, based on CLA, do better in the workplace than students in the bottom quintile.
Thank you Richard Arum for your valuable and pioneering contribution to education.