Long before I started the Spy in 2009, I had the unusual opportunity to work at two very different institutions of higher education. During the 1980s, I served as vice president for development and public affairs at Washington College, and my last real job was at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a deputy director of the Berkeley Art Museum in the early 2000s.
The differences between the two couldn’t be more extreme. Washington College has about 850 students. Berkeley has more than 27,000 undergraduates. One is a small liberal arts college in rural Maryland. The other is one of the world’s great public research universities in an urban setting.
But they do share a strong conviction that one of the central purposes of higher education is to produce graduates who can think critically, and both make that skill one of the major promises of the education they offer.
Washington College could hardly be more explicit. Its mission says the college develops in students “habits of analytic thought and clear communication,” and its vision names “critical thinking, effective communication, and moral courage” among its enduring values. Its admissions marketing promises a pathway to “fulfillment, leadership and advancement” through “rational thought, critical thinking, analytical skills, problem-solving abilities.”
Berkeley makes the same case in different terms. Its College of Letters and Science says a liberal arts education prepares students “not just for a career, but for a life,” encouraging them to think “deeply, critically, and creatively.” Its academic guide says the campus is “strongly committed to developing high levels of ability in critical thinking and communication among its undergraduates.”
These are not incidental benefits. They are part of the basic proposition colleges and universities make to students and their parents: come here, spend four years with us, and among the most important things we will teach you is how to think.
That idea feels especially important today. We expect leaders to separate fact from opinion, weigh evidence, recognize weak arguments, understand consequences, and change their minds when the facts require it. The same is true for doctors, lawyers, executives, teachers, journalists, scientists, and anyone else entrusted with important decisions. We call this critical thinking, and almost everyone agrees it matters.
The idea is hardly new. William Smith, the founder and first president of Washington College, described in 1782 the purpose of higher education in wonderfully simple language: “What chiefly has been aimed at is to teach youth to think well and justly.” Washington College’s current language about “habits of analytic thought” is essentially a modern version of Smith’s eighteenth century ambition. Berkeley’s language is not very different. Think deeply. Think critically. Ask how and why.
Colleges across the country present critical thinking as one of the most valuable outcomes of an undergraduate education. Which raises a simple question. How do we know whether it worked?
After four years of college, and in some cases close to a $400,000 investment, graduation arrives. The student leaves with a diploma, a transcript, and perhaps honors, internships, and recommendations. All of that tells us a great deal about what the student did in college, but almost nothing about their ability to reason.
More precisely, how is a future employer supposed to know whether a recent graduate can examine evidence, distinguish a strong argument from a weak one, recognize an unsupported assumption, understand competing points of view, identify misinformation, and reach a reasoned conclusion? And perhaps more important, did the student become substantially better at those things during four years of college?
That strikes me as one of the stranger gaps in higher education. Critical thinking is routinely promoted as one of the most valuable skills a graduate can offer an employer. Yet there is no broadly accepted credential demonstrating that a student actually possesses it.
This is not because nobody has tried. The Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal has existed in various forms for decades, and from what I can see, it is still used in certain circumstances. Accounting firms, apparently, still ask job applicants to take it. Other assessments try to measure reasoning, inference, argument evaluation, and problem-solving. Colleges conduct their own internal assessments as well.
Washington College has built “critical inquiry” directly into its general education program, and its first year seminar introduces students to the “habits of critical inquiry” at the heart of a liberal education. Berkeley has spent years developing ways for departments to define and assess what their students should know and be able to do.
In other words, the issue is not that critical thinking cannot be assessed. It is that no assessment has become a widely accepted credential of undergraduate achievement. Those assessments generally remain within the institution. They may help a college evaluate its curriculum, but they offer graduates little they can take into the marketplace. A graduate does not enter a job interview with a measure of how well they reason, how effectively they evaluate evidence, or how much they improved in these skills during college.
Perhaps there are good reasons for that. Thinking is complicated. A single score could never capture judgment, wisdom, curiosity, creativity, intellectual humility, or the willingness to reconsider a deeply held belief. Universities may reasonably resist reducing one of education’s most important achievements to another standardized test. But that does not make the question disappear.
We already measure all sorts of things. Many students have traditionally taken standardized tests before college to measure academic readiness and reasoning. We have GPAs and transcripts during college. Lawyers take bar examinations. Doctors face licensing examinations. Accountants take the CPA exam. Yet there is no commonly recognized measure at the end of college that tells an employer this person has demonstrated an unusually strong capacity to reason.
That seems especially important now. Artificial intelligence can already summarize articles, prepare reports, build arguments, gather research, and produce polished prose. Many signs once associated with an educated person can increasingly be generated by a machine. This makes genuine thinking more valuable, not less. An essential human skill may be learning to question what a machine produces: Is it true? What evidence supports it? What is missing? What assumptions were made? Is there another explanation? Does the conclusion follow logically from the evidence?
Those are critical thinking questions. They are also civic questions. At a moment when Americans are flooded with information, political claims, advertising, social media, AI-generated content, and competing versions of reality, the ability to think well may be as important to citizenship as it is to employment.
That brings me back to William Smith. More than two centuries ago, he offered a simple definition of what higher education should accomplish: teach young people to think well and justly. Washington College still promises essentially that. So does Berkeley. So do hundreds of other colleges and universities.
The question for higher education is no longer whether critical thinking belongs at the center of its mission. Our schools have already settled that. The harder question is whether they can show us they kept it.
