Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?

Abstract

Higher education contributes immensely to economic growth, social progress, and overall quality of life through the skills students and graduates acquire.Qualifications awarded by higher education institutions are valued because they are perceived to signal the skills required by labour markets and broader society.Employers use these qualifications as ways to identify and select job candidates who master essential and requisite skills.Higher education is trusted by employers and society to the extent that there is an equilibrium between skills supply and demand.However, there are signs that the skills supply of graduates no longer matches skills demand in the labour market.Quantitative qualifications mismatch is turning into a severe issue in many countries, compromising productivity, growth and the continued increase in prosperity.Even more significant is the qualitative mismatch between the skills demand generated by the economic and social reality in labour markets and societies, and the supply of skills by higher education institutions.Employers and economic organisations express with increasingly louder voices that they are no longer confident that graduates have acquired the skills needed for the 21st-century workplace, in particular, generic skills such as problem solving, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.Whether perceived or real, skills mismatch poses a serious risk to the trustworthiness of higher education.What is needed is more transparency about the skills students acquire.Unfortunately, this has not been a strength of most higher education systems.Transparency tools such as international rankings are quite good at capturing research-related measures or input measures in education quality but do not provide any insights into students' actual learning outcomes.The few available measures, for example, provided by the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), are far from sufficient and invigorate the demand for more and better metrics.Between 2008 and 2013, the OECD led the Assessing Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) feasibility study.Despite a positive conclusion on the feasibility of the initiative, the proposal tabled by the OECD in 2015 to start the main study did not attract sufficient support and the project was abandoned.However, a small number of countries that supported the project decided to continue the endeavour at a smaller scale.The collaborative work concentrated on what was perceived to be the most interesting and urgent issue, i.e. the assessment of the generic skills of higher education students and graduates.The initiative found a partner in the Council for Aid to Education, Inc., a non-profit organisation in the United States with a long history of assessing generic skills in post-secondary education with its proprietary Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) instrument.This volume reports on the work pursued between 2016 and 2021 to assess critical thinking and written communication, and associated skills in higher education institutions in six countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, Finland, and Chile).Part I explores the conceptual and methodological dimensions of assessing students' generic learning outcomes.Chapter 1 outlines the issues regarding changing skills demand, skills mismatch, transparency, and trust in higher education.

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