The standard way to evaluate college ROI focuses almost entirely on earnings, specifically the wage difference between those with and without a degree. This metric has some value, but it captures only a small fraction of what a well-executed college education delivers. The most durable asset, structured independent critical thinking, rarely shows up in these calculations.
The American Management Association consistently identifies critical thinking as the skill employers most frequently find lacking in new graduates, yet consider most essential to long-term career advancement. This creates a revealing paradox. Families invest substantial resources in degrees designed, ostensibly, to develop analytical reasoning, yet employers report receiving graduates who struggle to evaluate evidence, build logical arguments, or navigate ambiguous problems without significant hand-holding.
We are already seeing evidence that the rapid expansion of AI will exacerbate this problem, along with the pervasiveness of social media, which both undercuts our practice absorbing and analyzing complex material and also sorts us into separate tribes with different sources of information. All this makes it yet harder to develop critical habits of mind through a college education.
But there are colleges working hard to focus students and faculty on core critical thinking skills. In part, this is a response to the need for reasoned dialogue across difference, which has received much attention since the surge in student protests of the Gaza war in 2024. But it also reflects the pressure institutions are feeling from legislators and the public, to justify the substantial federal spending on higher education with evidence that students are learning valuable skills.
Schools that are explicit about these goals and have programs in place to address them are ahead of the curve.
When evaluating colleges, it's worth looking beyond starting salary data. Ask whether the curriculum requires sustained engagement with primary sources rather than textbooks. Ask how many pages of reading and of writing typical courses require. Ask whether students are evaluated through analytical writing and structured argument, or primarily through recall-based tests. Ask current students or recent grads if they were pushed to work hard and held to high standards. Given what a college degree costs these days, you want to be sure you’re getting your money’s worth.
The four-year residential college experience, when it functions well, also provides something harder to quantify: an environment specifically designed to encounter unfamiliar ideas, engage with people who think differently, and develop the tolerance for complexity that sophisticated thinking requires. No purely transactional educational model replicates this.
The practical takeaway for families is straightforward: evaluate colleges partly as critical-thinking development programs, not solely as credential-delivery systems. The graduate who can rigorously analyze an unfamiliar problem in 2035 will likely outperform the graduate who mastered a now-outdated technical specialization, regardless of where either went to school or what their starting salary was.
Bottom line: it’s no wonder that many students struggle now to gain the skills of critical thinking that they need, and why colleges struggle to figure out how to introduce and develop them more effectively than they have.