Arum’s most notable contributions to research on higher education stem from his work on the CLA Longitudinal Study, a project he led as Education Research Program Director at the Social Science Research Council from 2005-2013. The CLA Longitudinal Study was a large-scale longitudinal study that “tracked over 2,000 young adults as they made their way through college and transitioned into the labor force and graduate school.” Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses is a book based on the first two years of the study. It received national media attention for its finding that, after the first two years of college, a significant number of students demonstrated no improvement in a range of skills, including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. A follow-up book to Academically Adrift, entitled Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, was released in September 2014. Arum co-authored both of these books with Josipa Roksa, associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia.
K-12 education
Arum is author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools, a book that examines the evolution of school discipline in the United States, and co-editor of Improving Learning Environments in Schools: Lessons from Abroad, an edited volume that examines school discipline from an international comparative perspective. He has also written several articles and book chapters on race and stratification in public and private schools. From 2005-2009, as Program Director of Education Research at the Social Science Research Council, he led efforts to create the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, an entity that focuses on ongoing evaluation and assessment research to support public school improvement efforts. Since 2011, Arum has served as principal investigator of Connecting Youth, a multi-city research project on teen behaviors, attitudes, and competencies around digital media and learning. The purpose of this research is to document how a set of informal out-of-school programs and two schools are implementing initiatives that seek to encourage student-centered, peer-supported learning, the role of technology in learning, and how these elements shape youth trajectories.
Selected publications
Books
Arum, Richard and Josipa Roksa. Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Arum, Richard and Melissa Velez, eds. Improving Learning Environments in Schools: Lessons from Abroad. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Arum, Richard and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Shavit, Yossi, Richard Arum, and Adam Gamoran, eds. Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Arum, Richard and Walter Mueller, eds. The Resurgence of Self-Employment: A Comparative Study of Self-Employment Dynamics and Social Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Arum Richard, with Irenee Beattie, Richard Pitt, Jennifer Thompson, and Sandra Way. Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Articles
Roksa, Josipa and Richard Arum. "Life after College: The Challenging Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort." Change Magazine July/August.
Roksa, Josipa and Richard Arum. "The State of Undergraduate Learning." Change Magazine March/April.
Stevens, Mitchell, Elizabeth Armstrong and Richard Arum. “Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education,” Annual Review of Sociology 34:127-152.
"The Effect of Racially Segregated Schools on African American and White Incarceration Rates, 1970 to 1990," with Gary LaFree, Criminology 44:1, 73-103
Arum, Richard. "Schools and Communities: Ecological and Institutional Dimensions," Annual Review of Sociology 26:395-418.
Arum, Richard. "Do Private Schools Force Public Schools to Compete?" American Sociological Review 61:29-46.
