In an article in The Huffington Post, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) President Bill Destler described a perplexing puzzle that gets at the very essence of a university’s responsibility to its students: colleges and universities must demonstrate that their students have attained differentiated elements of critical thinking (e.g. logic, analysis, evaluation) to accrediting bodies, but the employers who hire college graduates routinely express discontent about the critical thinking skills of their employees. In other words, colleges certify students as competent in critical thinking, but employers beg to differ.

According to Destler the answer to this puzzle is multi-pronged. First, colleges and universities haven’t developed accurate ways of evaluating critical thinking, often relying on self-assessments that overstate competency, and seldom integrating employers’ perspectives into their definitions and metrics. As a result, there is a disconnect between what elements of critical thinking are emphasized in universities, and what applications for critical thinking are needed in the workplace. And second, institutions of higher learning have sought to develop critical thinking skills in a few siloed courses – logic, for example – rather than teaching critical thinking throughout the curriculum. RIT and Destler are working to change these trends.

Higher education – particularly in the humanities – has been accused of irrelevance and deception as many students take on large amounts of debt to acquire educations that don’t always prepare them for the work world. To be sure, the higher education community has not done itself any favors, often failing to explain why reading Proust or parsing Plato is important. While employers are not the only ones who should contribute to conversations about curricular changes, colleges and universities often fall short of defining and strategically developing so-called “soft skills” among their students.

Indeed, this is something that we frequently hear from employers with whom we partner at Books@Work. They often tell us that employees with associate’s and bachelor’s degrees – especially those in technical fields – do not come with the critical thinking, communication or collaboration skills that those degrees might imply. A college degree does not always signal job success and employers are often left scratching their heads about what they can do to provide the training that higher education failed to provide.

Rather than detracting from higher education’s efforts to define and measure critical thinking skills, the humanities can and should be front and center. Our own experience at Books@Work tells us that this is not only possible but powerful. Time and again we have seen the power of literature to unlock new meaning, invite important conversations about difficult topics and encourage and facilitate debate among participants. The seminar conversation requires listening and parsing through diverse ideas, learning to agree and to disagree with insight and respect. Through this process, participants learn to apply the components of critical thinking that university accreditation bodies define and at times impart, but seldom provide roadmaps for achieving.

Tell us about your experience – think about a time when you were particularly successful in the way you tackled a thorny problem or approached a new challenge. Where (and how) did you get the skills to unlock that success?

Image: Paolo Caliari Veronese, Allegory of Navigation with an Astrolabe: Ptolemy, 1557, Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons