Development of students’ higher-order mental capacities, like critical thinking or elegant communication, is certainly one of the objectives of a college education, but all too often it is secondary to the ingestion of content. More often than not, college courses are not designed to nurture metacognitive skills explicitly and systematically.

When polls were conducted of incoming American freshman in the late sixties, a full 80 percent of respondents said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life; around 45 percent felt financial success was essential.43 For the students surveyed, university was less about career training than self-actualization.

Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More.