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Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

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Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#271

Post by [deleted] »

lr4444lr wrote: post #262
davidf18 wrote: post #195

Why wait for college to teach critical thinking skills? My father is a prof at a major university and we grew up discussing ideas, but high schools can teach critical thinking skills and problem solving. My high school was owned by the university and we did a lot of critical thinking. Jewish religious schools (Yeshivas) teach critical thinking skills by studying the Talmud [1]. A number of Yeshiva students take the L…

What law schools admit people without an (undergrad) college transcript?

[deleted]

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#272

Post by majewsky »

emodendroket wrote: post #175
majewsky wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me about a segment on Last Week Tonight where they showed a map of South America, with one country highlighted as Peru. And John Oliver said, "Peru! A country you care so little about you didn't even realize this isn't Peru... [Highlight changes to another country] THIS is Peru." And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working…

In fact one reason so many people have such confused ideas about foreign politics is a lack of understanding of geography. Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...

I think they got their causation backwards. A working understanding of how foreign policy works is correlated with a higher education level is correlated with being able to find countries on a map.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#273

Post by icelancer »

shahbaby wrote: post #134
rockinghigh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck finding a job without a college degree.

This guy should not be down voted. For better or worse, College is the new high-school. Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside. The value of a College degree depend heavily on…

>The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?

Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall?

People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there).

More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#274

Post by icelancer »

gagege wrote: post #167
shahbaby wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy should not be down voted. For better or worse, College is the new high-school. Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside. The value of a College degree depend heavily on…

> it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.

>It won't get that bad in our lifetimes

I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well).

There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#275

Post by learc83 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #163
learc83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

biology and economics aren't humanities. But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?

Where did I argue that biology and economics are humanities, and how is that relevant to my post?

The OP said that they only wanted to take classes directly relevant to their future career. Biology and economics are examples of classes that I didn't think were relevant to my career (at the time).

>But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?

The first time I went to college I had a full ride scholarship, so I didn't pay a dime. The second time I paid, and I took another art history class. I think I paid about $1500 total for that course.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#276

Post by plinkplonk »

belenos46 wrote: post #253
plinkplonk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank You for the condescension! :-P

It's a quote from Glengarry Glen Ross. That is one of Alec Baldwin's lines.

Ah! It sounded familiar.

OK, my bad! withdrawn (Can't edit any more). Apologies to pvg

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#277

Post by Xeoncross »

akud wrote: post #223
Xeoncross wrote: post #220

I'm working on critical thinking with my 2 year old. If he can't think critically by college then I've failed. I spend time each day practicing discussing things with him and he has already come to assume if he wants anything in life he will need to talk about it as throwing a fit or whining ensures he does not get anything. People assume because kids haven't been trained, they can't be trained. So they wait until th…

I have a 1&1/2 year old, and I'm curious about your approach. What kind of things do you discuss with your son? Is it on the level of "if you want a cookie, you have to ask" or more like "why do you think so-and-so did that?"

> if you want a cookie, you have to ask

Is a good start - then I build from there. We're working on the 'understanding' part of critical thinking right now since he is still trying to make sense of the world.

A) Whining isn't a nice way to ask. [start conversation about manners...]

B) No. We just ate lunch. [start conversation about eating when we all eat..]

C) No. Do you know why we don't eat cookies all the time? [etc...]

D. Yes. Can you talk one to ____ also? Do you think they want one?

Each of these is a series of short explanations along with a question for him to answer and speak his mind. If he doesn't understand I say something similar I know he can respond too.

For a 2 year old, people have remarked how well he talks/communicates.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#278

Post by emodendroket »

majewsky wrote: post #272
emodendroket wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact one reason so many people have such confused ideas about foreign politics is a lack of understanding of geography. Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...

I think they got their causation backwards. A working understanding of how foreign policy works is correlated with a higher education level is correlated with being able to find countries on a map.

How is someone supposed to understand foreign policy if they think North Korea is in Australia?

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#279

Post by sprafa »

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…

Occupy Wall Street's lack of agenda was a deliberate move.

Apparently some of its leaders believed (and I would say, probably correctly) that advancing an agenda simply gives your opponents an opportunity to take you down. Instead they focused on 1 message and making sure it was broadcast: income inequality is a lot bigger than you think and it might be a problem. They left the answer to the public.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#280

Post by dhimes »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #249
ergothus wrote: post #245

I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have. It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading. Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about the…

Side story about the 4/5 recommendation, this one for toothpaste: apparently Colgate would just ask dentists to list every type of toothpaste they recommended, and 80% of those doctors wrote down Colgate as an option, thus the "four out of five dentists recommend Colgate" ads. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-...

Now I'm very interested why 20% wouldn't write down Colgate. Did they know something the others didn't?
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