The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills.
Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
11–20 of 328 posts
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#12Link to get past paywall: https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#13Communist professors are assaulting protestors with bikelocks. That really tells me all I need to know.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#14I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
Most students aren't paying that much. Sticker prices are often much higher than what students actually pay. The sticker price at Harvard is around $60k, but 70% of students receive financial aid from the University and of those students the average paid is actually only about $12k per year.
Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year.
What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#15I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... ), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them. In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, bu…
Totally agree. It took me until several years out of school to realize that learning to think should have been a primary focus of university. 25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been: 1. Learning how to think 2. Learning how to learn Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:…
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Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#16I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
It's reasonable if you think about the sticker price as the "max price". We let colleges do price discrimination, so why should they hold themselves to a smaller max price if there are people they think are willing to pay more? Then they discount it for people who probably aren't.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#17The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and deve…
I have attended several different colleges, and my kids have all attended different colleges (than the ones that I've attended) and from that sample we discovered great variation in both the quality of the teaching and the focus of the teaching. From our limited data set (3 private liberal arts, 1 private "top ten", 3 different community colleges) the small private liberal arts colleges all had some classes that were taught by professors who cared that the students really understood the material, the community college classes were mostly taught to the exam, and my experience at USC was the big 'survey' classes (like EE101, CS203, etc) were generally taught to the exam (specific learning skills were 'taught' in the lab sessions) but the more specialized classes (like EE450 engineering calculus) were more focused on developing skills at using the material in your future life.
Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#18I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... ), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them. In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, bu…
I'm a student and I agree. I'm enrolled in 3 classes right now that will have little to no impact on my future career. I am personally motivated to learn more about topics that interest me, and I believe that colleges should be more focused on helping kids work towards something that they want to do, and not have them taking extraneous classes just for the sake of it.
I don't think you're really agreeing with the OP. The OP didn't say anything about not making you take classes that aren't directly focused on your career.
Those classes are what make college different from trade school. You may think it sounds like a meaningless platitude now when you just want hurry up and be done with the whole thing, but many of those "extraneous" classes will make you a more rounded person if you allow them to.
I'm a vastly different person at 33 than I was at 18, I'm interested in different things now partly because I was exposed to subjects I wasn't particularly interested in at the time. 15 years later, I'm glad that my past self sat through art history, biology, and economics.
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#19I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
Most students aren't paying that much. Sticker prices are often much higher than what students actually pay. The sticker price at Harvard is around $60k, but 70% of students receive financial aid from the University and of those students the average paid is actually only about $12k per year. Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k p…
> What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
To be fair, this is what the system strives to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low).
On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.)
Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
#20If people had critical thinking skills they wouldn't be taking out outrageous loans to pay for often worthless degrees.