The College Try

According to a new study, college isn’t improving critical thinking skills like it is supposed to be:

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging. {…}

Some academic experts, education researchers and employers say the Journal’s findings are a sign of the failure of America’s higher-education system to arm graduates with analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in a fast-changing, increasingly global job market. In addition, rising tuition, student debt and loan defaults are putting colleges and universities under pressure to prove their value.

A survey by PayScale Inc., an online pay and benefits researcher, showed 50% of employers complain that college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace. Their No. 1 complaint? Poor critical-reasoning skills.

“At most schools in this country, students basically spend four years in college, and they don’t necessarily become better thinkers and problem solvers,” said Josipa Roksa, a University of Virginia sociology professor who co-wrote a book in 2011 about the CLA+ test. “Employers are going to hire the best they can get, and if we don’t have that, then what is at stake in the long run is our ability to compete.”

Employers complaining about a lack of critical skills seems important to those of us who believes that a lot of the public interest in higher education is as a conduit for economic contribution. On the other hand, this simply be another case of employers wanting the full package from each employee in each day. If we had an appropriate measure of which schools and majors were putting out graduates with good critical thinking skills, would graduates of that school and majors have an easier or harder time getting jobs compared to those whose graduates are more directly vocation-ready?

In any event, at first glance the article may be yet another indication that college may be an overprescribed solution to our various problems. One of the arguments for sending more people to college is that it increases human capital by creating smarter people. This is in contrast to the argument that it mostly acts as a signalling mechanism to employers, in which case there is a zero-sum aspect. If this holds true, then college isn’t even doing the positive-sum thing!

This kneejerk response on my part rested on assumptions of who it was helping and who it wasn’t. And more importantly, which schools. Intuitively, I expected the premier schools to promote the most positive-sum gains and schools with more marginal students to do the least. That turns out not to be the case. The average students at flagships (which are not necessarily exclusive but do attract better students than directionals) show comparatively little value, while “smaller colleges where students are less accomplished at arrival” do the best. Notably, that last part is only true if they pursue “a rigorous, interdisciplinary curriculum.”

Looking through the universities in question, though, it’s honestly not that easy to find the pattern described or any pattern. My question of what they meant when they were talking about “smaller colleges” was whether they were talking about posh private schools or Angelo State. The premier school, Plymouth State, has more in common with the latter. But while Plymouth State is at the top, the University of Louisiana Lafayette is at the bottom. Both have “Freshman with below basic schools” at around 40%, both are former normal schools. Louisiana is bigger, but falls in the middle of the “top four” in terms of student population. The University of Texas is mentioned negatively throughout the article, but scores in the middle of the pack when stacked against its smaller system brethren (ahead of Arlington, below San Antonio, and close with Dallas).

I was prepared to believe that maybe “smaller is better” as far as universities go, and am sympathetic to the notion that we would do better with a lot of smaller public liberal arts schools than Mammoth State Universities, but it’s not clear that’s where the data here leads. The data does seem to skew in favor of those that take in borderline students, suggesting that maybe it’s
a more worthwile investment or a matter of “more room to improve” depending on whether you’re optimistic or cynical, but the data there is all over the place. I am inclined to think that the schools that would perform the worst are schools with local kids getting business degrees because they’re supposed to, and while that describes Louisiana it also describes Cal State-San Bernardino (which scored well) and definitely does not describe the Citidel (second worst).

The past year has, to me, provided a more powerful argument in favor of more broad education, including liberal arts and critical thinking. So I’m unusually open to arguments like the above, rather than focusing primarily on the vocational aspects. Unsurprisingly, several of the universities with unimpressive scores are themselves unimpressed with the test on which they score unimpressively. They may or may not have a point as far as that goes. And, of course, Goodhart’s Law may apply here, so we should be careful. But if we can find out what Plymouth State is doing, that could be a good thing for all involved.