July 24...yikes! Where did the summer go?!? Here’s to hoping you’ve made more progress on your summer to-do list than I have because it seems the start of the fall semester will be here before we know it. In this week’s issue, I revisit three-year degrees again to discuss whether some of the opposition to them is defensible. I close with three Sparks about the earnings test, bachelor’s degrees at community colleges, and student loan defaults.  

Confidence Falls While Workers are Needed 

From Pennsylvania’s state universities will consider offering three-year bachelor’s degrees | The Philadelphia Inquirer 

The ten universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education may soon offer reduced credit (90-100) three-year degrees. 

Our Thoughts  

Yes, I do live in Pennsylvania, but that’s not specifically why I’m featuring this article. I could have just as easily selected this article from Axios about Virginia’s plans. I’m specifically featuring this article because it features a quote from a joint statement from The American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers, and I want to discuss the inherent tension in that quote within higher education and society at large. 

“Compressing or reducing the curriculum threatens to narrow students’ education at precisely the moment when society needs graduates with stronger critical thinking, communication skills, scientific literacy, and civic understanding.” 

For as long as I worked in higher education, employers have asked us to produce graduates with those skills. While I agree with AAUP and AFT’s premise, as I’m sure many readers do, I think we’d have a hard time definitively pointing to where those skills are developed in the curriculum and how we know.  

Earlier this month, Scott Carlson spent most of a Chronicle feature discussing this gap. Through interviews and conversations, Carlson repeatedly finds that higher education scholars believe that institutions do not explicitly teach critical thinking, instead expecting students to learn this skill simply through osmosis and exposure. In late June, Inside Higher Ed featured an opinion piece that made similar arguments, asking whether we were "ever really teaching it in the first place." So, if two recent media pieces argue that critical thinking is a byproduct of the college experience for some students, perhaps due to chance since we don’t explicitly teach it, what does the academic literature have to say?  

Quite a bit, but also with unclear conclusions. Back in 1989, Robert Ennis sorted critical thinking instruction into four types: general, infusion, immersion, and mixed. Since then, this framework has been used in a variety of studies to better understand how critical thinking instruction occurs and whether that instruction has any effect on the critical thinking skills of students. In 2008, Philip Abrami and colleagues tested that framework in meta-analysis built on 117 studies and nearly 21,000 participants. They found a modest but consistent positive effect in the development of critical thinking skills, though the results varied somewhat across different studies. The gap between approaches was the striking part: courses where the reasoning objectives were left implicit produced an effect size of 0.09, against 0.54 where they were made explicit. More specifically, they concluded that the development of critical thinking must be explicit with intentional course design; skills are rarely improved by accident.  

In 2015, Abrami and colleagues revisited their meta-analysis with a larger sample, finding a smaller positive effect than in 2008, but identifying three specific teaching strategies that positively affect critical thinking skills—dialogue, authentic or anchored instruction, and mentoring. A year later, Christopher Huber and Nathan Kuncel asked the question directly in a meta-analysis titled Does College Teach Critical Thinking? and found that it does, with students gaining incrementally per semester over an ordinary college experience. Campus-wide initiatives built specifically to teach critical thinking added little on top of that. Their paper drew a published rebuttal over how they assembled their sample, so I wouldn't treat it as the last word, but it argues against the idea that we've never taught this at all. Finally, of course, we have Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift, which found that at the end of sophomore year, 45 percent of students showed no statistically significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. Alexander Astin and others later argued that finding says more about the reliability of the instrument than about what students learned, which tells you something about where this field stands.  

Taken together, the literature doesn't say we have never taught critical thinking; it says we cannot tell, with a variety of ways of measuring it, which is why researchers keep arriving at answers. That's the part that should worry us more than the headlines do. If people who study this professionally can't agree on whether four years of college develops critical thinking, no campus in Pennsylvania or Virginia (or any state) is going to walk into a board meeting in October and demonstrate what its particular thirty credits of general education and electives produce. The unions are defending something they can't measure, and the system leadership is proposing to cut something nobody has measured, and both sides are arguing about the same undifferentiated block of curriculum. 

I know this is the fourth time three-year degrees have come up in my weekly blog, and I’ve landed in a slightly different place each time, but that’s what happens when you read and think more about something. The last time, I settled somewhere in the middle: the programs make sense for a student who already knows what they want, they get riskier for the much larger group who don't, and when students describe general education as filler, the honest response is to design those courses better rather than eliminate them. I still think that’s where I am. We know college changes students. We may still be stuck on what that means or how to measure one specific part (measuring learning is hard, okay?), but I’m not sure cutting 30 credits for students who may need that time to continue their growth is the right decision. We may not realize its importance until it’s gone. 

Sparks 

• How Soon Could Colleges Lose Loan Access Under New Accountability Metric? (Inside Higher Ed) - Programs that fail the earnings test could lose federal loan eligibility in 2028, unless you’re one of the programs that received an extension. I feel like if we’re waiting for better data about tips, which are an unreliable source of income, to determine whether your program meets the earnings test, we’re missing the point. 
• Facing political attack and falling enrollment, colleges take the fight to … each other (The Hechinger Report) - In Illinois, four-year institutions work to block a proposal that would allow community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees. Their reason? It would cut into their business. This one is tough because I believe in more student access, but also fully understand their reasoning. 
• Student Loan Defaults Hit Record (Fortune) - 9.5 million people (about 1 in 5 federal student loan borrowers) are in default, meaning they are at least nine months behind on their payments. Although probably a sign of larger economic issues, this is not the best news when the majority of the public is questioning the value of higher education.