What do students really learn at university? How does what they learn help them later in life? A slice of evidence on these very big questions comes from “Does higher education teach students to think critically? » edited by Dirk Van Damme and Doris Zahner, and has just been published by the OECD.
The study focuses on a test called CLA+, which stands for Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+). The test “is an assessment of higher education students’ generic skills, in particular critical thinking, problem solving and written communication”. I’ve often heard colleges and universities offer a comment to incoming students like, “Don’t worry too much about your specific major. What is important is that you learn to think. The CLA+ test can be seen as an attempt to measure these “how to think” skills. The test is a proprietary instrument created by a US-based non-profit organization, the Council for Aid to Education. The test has been widely used in American higher education over the past decade, although a primary focus of this report is the effort to develop an international version of the test.
Here is the general pattern for US colleges and universities. It’s not an official random sample, but it includes hundreds of thousands of students at hundreds of institutions, so it’s likely to contain some useful information.
The painting gives me a decidedly half-full, half-empty feeling. On the positive side, the proportion of university students at the lowest levels of ’emergence’ and ‘development’ decreases between incoming (blue bars) and outgoing (gray bars) students. On the negative side, the average earnings are not as great as one might prefer to see for four years of college; for example, 58% of incoming students are in the two lowest categories, and 47% of outgoing students are always in these two lowest categories. The report describes the general trend as follows:
Overall, it is encouraging to see that during their time in a higher education program, students have improved their critical thinking skills. However, given the importance that most higher education programs place on fostering critical thinking skills, the learning gain is lower than expected. If universities are serious about fostering 21st century skills such as critical thinking, they need to step up their efforts. While universities produce graduates who can be considered, on average, competent in critical thinking, the distribution of results is quite wide, with one-fifth of students scoring at the lowest level. With half of outgoing students achieving the lowest two levels, it is difficult to argue that a university qualification reliably signals a level of critical thinking skills expected by the global marketplace.
Moreover, comparing American students entering college and university with those who graduate will not capture the experience of those who do not graduate.
However, despite the upward trend in college enrollment over the past two decades, college graduation rates remain relatively low in the United States. According to the National Center of Education Statistics (Hussar et al., 2020[7]), as of spring 2020, nearly 40% of students who started seeking a bachelor’s degree at a four-year institution in 2012 have yet to graduate. Additionally, year-to-year retention rates vary significantly from institution to institution. Between 2017 and 2018, although highly selective schools had high retention rates of 97%, less selective schools with open admissions retained a significantly lower percentage (62%) of their students during this same period. (Hussar et al., 2020[7]). Contrary to an often held view that academic persistence is a “first year” problem, student attrition remains a risk for students at all grade levels, with approximately one-third of college dropouts having achieved at least three quarters of the credits required for graduation (Mabel and Britton, 2018[8]). Although many students cite non-academic reasons such as financial hardship, health, or family obligations as primary causes for dropping out or postponing their college education (Astin & Oseguera, 2012[9]), academic failure is also an important factor contributing to the lack of perseverance and the decrease in the retention of students in higher education.
Thus, as the report notes:
The analysis cannot positively confirm that the learning gain is caused by the teaching and learning experience in university programs. It is possible that, for example, selection effects (selective dropout), general maturation of the student population, or out-of-university learning effects contribute to the average learning gain.
With higher education, as with many other areas of public policy, I feel like we often have arguments by anecdote. One side highlights some individual successes; the other points to contrasting examples of failures. The CLA+ is just one test among many (although it is a widely used test that, as the OECD notes, is highly regarded in the United States and around the world). But this evidence is at best only mildly reassuring that the average student is making great strides in the overall goal of “learning to think.”