Question

Write a Letter to the Editor:- Admission to higher education is becoming increasingly difficult with cut-off lists for admission to universities and colleges constantly rising. Write a letter in about 120 – 150 words to the editor of a national newspaper voicing your concern over the issue.​

Answer 1

Answer:

For close to 50 years, educators and politicians from classrooms to the Oval Office have stressed the importance of graduating students who are skilled critical thinkers.

Content that once had to be drilled into students’ heads is now just a phone swipe away, but the ability to make sense of that information requires thinking critically about it. Similarly, our democracy is today imperiled not by lack of access to data and opinions about the most important issues of the day, but rather by our inability to sort the true from the fake (or hopelessly biased).

We have certainly made progress in critical-thinking education over the last five decades. Courses dedicated to the subject can be found in the catalogs of many colleges and universities, while the latest generation of K-12 academic standards emphasize not just content but also the skills necessary to think critically about content taught in English, math, science and social studies classes.

Despite this progress, 75 percent of employers claim the students they hire after 12, 16 or more years of formal education lack the ability to think critically and solve problems -- despite the fact that nearly all educators claim to prioritize helping students develop those very skills. Those statistics were included in Academically Adrift, the 2011 book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, which caused a stir when the authors asserted that students made little to no progress in critical-thinking ability during their college years.

With perils mounting, many of them attributable to too little critical thinking about the subjects that matter most, we clearly must do more to ensure today’s students become tomorrow’s skilled thinkers. Fortunately, we are in a position to do so without having to overturn the current higher education system or break the bank.