American universities are the envy of the world, but a few hundred very prestigious schools hide the fact that most colleges perform no ground-breaking research, offer mostly large and impersonal lecture classes, and provide students with few extras. Almost half of students—42 percent—who start a bachelor’s degree drop out of college. Student loan debt is crippling, surpassing $1 trillion in 2012. The average student borrower leaves school $27,000 in the red. Adding insult to injury, almost half of all college students make little or no learning gains in their first two years of college, according to a 2010 book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift.
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