Does a "liberal arts" education promote complex cognition reasoning?

“The purpose of college is to make you a better thinker.” “The purpose of college is to prepare you for a successful career.” These different ideas, which are not opposing by the way, continue to drive debates about what should and should not be included in postsecondary education. Demonstrating positive outcomes for career preparation is pretty straightforward (e.g., job placement rates, salary over time, career success over time) but it’s more challenging for the “liberal arts education” model. How do you measure whether college makes someone a “better thinker”?

A new study by Otoni and colleagues suggests a way to assess what “better thinking” is and how much a liberal arts education promotes it. Using lots of techniques I think we’ll be seeing more and more in education research (e.g., Bayesian analyses, directed acyclic graphs), these scholars showed a positive relationship between the number of courses taken outside the major (i.e., a more “liberal arts” education) and performance on numerous measures of complex cognitive reasoning. In addition, they found that intellectual curiosity scores enhanced this relationship.

So, within the scope and limitations of this study, there was evidence that having a more “liberal arts” education made people “better thinkers” - at least in terms of the outcomes measured. I’d love to see a follow-up study looking at more distal measures of “better thinking” post-college, which could include career success outcomes but would also cover things like susceptibility to misinformation and civic reasoning.