Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 328 posts

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#121

Post by Noseshine »

Animats wrote: post #34
jseliger wrote: post #2

I'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…

"Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers. I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs fo…

> Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying.

I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#122

Post by mannykannot »

jseliger wrote: post #2

I'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…

Why would one not be opposed to it? Not only do colleges not explicitly tell the students, they almost-explicitly promote contrary myths, as they must do in order to keep the pipeline filled. A generation is being encouraged to take on debt that many may never pay off, setting us up for a future crisis, in order to support the lifestyle of a privileged few.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#123

Post by ThomPete »

rockinghigh wrote: post #31
shirro wrote: post #20

If people had critical thinking skills they wouldn't be taking out outrageous loans to pay for often worthless degrees.

Good luck finding a job without a college degree.

Never had a problem. I got into the US on an O-Visa and got an EB1 Green Card. I build a company from scratch to 80 people, I helped take another to IPO as part of the senior level and is now back building another kind of company.

All without a collage degree. Oh and where I come from it's even free.

Not that it's not helpfull but it's certainly not necessary.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#124

Post by selllikesybok »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #67
Nickersf wrote: post #59

Every time a college sucks article gets published I think the same things: Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960's. Look at the tuition rates since the 1960's Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960's Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There's millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young peopl…

> Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money. Why is that, if I may ask? For me personally, my goal was to graduate with a CS degree as soon as possible right after high school so I could start my much higher paying full time engineering job as quickly as possible. I noticed you also majored in CS, so I wonder what I might have overlooked?

Since I had a similar experience, to add another response to your question, in my case it was a lack of direction and maturity.

I knew the outcome I wanted, but had no real motivation to work for it. And I lacked the coping skills I needed to overcome emotional a psychological challenges presented by college life.

Working a job (and getting fired, and working another job, and so on) prepared me much better for completing college than my K-12 education did.

If I'd waited until my late 20s, I'd have been much better off!

Worse, my father (who somehow got much smarter as I got older), anticipated this and told me so. So of course I did the opposite of what he recommended.

I was a CS major, originally, though not a very good one.

Obviously, each person is different and handles life differently. But for me, a few years not in school would have been a much better solution. I wound up behind my peer group career-wise regardless. Better to do it at lower cost.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#125

Post by thesagan »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #93

The article is about college but what about the previous 12 years of school. Why don't students learn critical thinking during those years. 12 years of school and students lack learning skills, critical thinking skills and what burns me most high school graduates don't have a marketable skill they can use to get a job if they have to start working. Last year's election focus on some very irrelevant subjects yet our g…

Yeah, I think this one of the great oversights of the higher ed discussion: the near collapse of much of the public school system "outcome profile". Sounds like we're trying to bandaid that with a declining uni system, too.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#126

Post by pas »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #97
icelancer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could always work for me. I tell applicants to leave off their education credentials and to show me their previous work history and projects. Hired a dropout who ended up producing sports science research that probably could have netted him a Ph.D. We're out there hiring.

> Hired a dropout who ended up producing sports science research that probably could have netted him a Ph.D. Is there any way he could turn that into actual Ph.D.? I ask out of curiosity, because many people do things in their professional lives that are equivalent of achievements in academic work, and I wonder if there's a way to turn former into the latter.

He/she can start publishing papers. Basically that's the only important thing to become a researcher/scholar. (You can be an independent scholar, so not associated with any research institute/university/group. But of course being in a group helps a lot.)

And then various universities and doctorate schools have various requirements for a PhD.

There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything. And some don't require completing courses if you have enough publications. So in theory it's possible to just do a couple exams and a thesis (which can - and usually is - just a bit more in depth aggregation and exposition of your previous research).

Is it worth it? Well, sure, if you want to have a PhD, but that part is much easier than producing great scientific papers, so if the person in question has good ideas and a sort of constant "scientific output", then why not?

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#127

Post by ooqr »

closure wrote: post #39
pvg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter have been the ostensible focus of primary education for a couple of centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_three_Rs

In a sense, yes. What I'm getting at specifically is that: - Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding. - Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning. - We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes thro…

We don't necessarily need to teach more-advanced math, but rather more proofs.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#128

Post by pas »

lemming wrote: post #111
raleighm wrote: post #89

Many comments here are about the value of higher ed generally and are fascinating to read, but I'm interested in critical reasoning particularly, and this study doesn't surprise me. (1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don't major in or take a philosophy course. (2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it's poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical rea…

Can you recommend a text on critical reasoning? It's something I often feel I'm quite bad at.

https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#129

Post by mannykannot »

Animats wrote: post #34
jseliger wrote: post #2

I'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…

"Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers. I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs fo…

There are both left-leaning and right-leaning sources that (more or less) apply critical thinking to issues, and then there are sources that attempt to persuade by provoking antagonism. While it is an unpleasant job, it is important to be aware of what is going on in this last category.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#130

Post by pas »

andrewflnr wrote: post #95

I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation of college. Critical thinking is hard to teach. I don't know if it's possible to scale it beyond the few teachers who are good at it. Measuring critical thinking is hard, too. The universities who criticized the test used here are probably not wrong, even if their motive is only to save face. It's only 90 minutes, which is a time limit more suited for quick sophistry than…

It's not that hard.

Go through the list of congnitive biases, but first look at usual problems of how people try to reason ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/ ), then expand on that.

https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/ - reading http://www.rationality.org/ - workshops

But the question is, does it _actually_ help that much? I mean, yeah, you'll have a neigh perfect model of the world, you can break down subjects, approach topics you've never dreamed of, but you'll find out that life is pretty much meaningless and you're surrounded with a lot of "dumb people", and pretty persistent emergent social structures that are hard to disrupt. And why would you spend a lot of your energy/life to try to make it better, if it'll still stay the same purposeless, senseless, pointless crude biological replication-driven frustrating chaos?

Anyway, 90 minutes is pretty long, but of course experiment design is always a hard problem.

Post reply on HN