Does College Matter? Measuring Critical-Thinking Outcomes Using the CLA

1 The title of this paper — Does College Matter? — asks whether there is evidence that students' set of real-world skills grow during their attendance in college (Pascarella and Terenzini,(2005). While this question has been of interest since the foundation of the Academy, it has recently come into increased focus, with concerns over rapidly rising tuition rates and student loan defaults. At the same time, the business community is wary of the skills students acquire in college, suggesting that in many cases students do not possess the necessary strengths and talents to be successful in the workplace. In short, educators, politicians, and the public at large are asking whether college is " worth it. " To fully address this issue, we need to first develop an understanding of what it means to matter—that is, what are the potential outcomes of a college education. At the risk of oversimplification, there are fundamentally two " camps " regarding outcomes. On the one hand there are those that emphasize the unique disciplinary knowledge and skills arising out of the major area of study. On the other, there are those who call for achieving outcomes that are common to all disciplines and seen as important regardless of area of study. But even among those who assert that there is a common set of cross-disciplinary outcomes that should result from the college experience, there is disagreement as to what those critical-thinking skills should be. There are those who suggest that the most important outcomes of the college experience are moral; that is to produce ethical members of society with a clear philosophical understanding of right and wrong is often cited as the target here. Still others cite a range of effective outcomes as the primary goals of post-secondary education. There is widespread agreement that critical-thinking skills, such as analysis of information, reasoning from text, and quantitative reasoning will enable students to be knowledgeable consumers of information, strong problem solvers, and effective decision makers (Shavelson, 2009). It is this set of critical-thinking skills, along with communication, that are measured by the CLA, which is the assessment used to draw conclusions presented in the paper. A full treatment of the range of college outcomes is well beyond this paper; we raise it here at the outset solely to clarify the outcomes which we address in this piece and to place those outcomes in a broader context. …