Does the higher education general education curriculum matter? Yes.

I’m about to fly home from the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction conference, which has been fantastic - I highly recommend going if you can. One of the more impressive presentations I saw was by Gabe Orona, who talked about this study recently published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. In it, Orona and colleagues use rigorous statistical methods to demonstrate that taking higher education courses outside of one’s major promotes critical thinking, as measured by one of the “big” measures of that construct. Now, I have thoughts about critical thinking and measures of it, but regardless, Orona et al conducted an excellent study with compelling results strongly supporting the idea that the liberal arts matter. And, they used contemporary, very thorough methods to not only demonstrate their relationships but also test and eliminate alternative explanations. The article is worth reading for those methods, alone. I suspect they will become standard in the future, but at the moment they are bleeding edge. But the take-home is this: breadth of education has tangible benefits, including increasing critical thinking performance, and therefore I recommend we all pause before suggesting higher education should “only” be for career preparation via one’s major. Kudos to Orona et al.!