Atheism is unstoppable.

[Angrboda]

College helps to hone one's critical thinking, no doubt

Um... I doubt. It will in some cases. In a lot of cases, not. 

I just want to avoid begging the question. "He must have good critical skills because he's an atheist." And how do we know that atheists have good critical thinking skills? "Because they're atheists."

The study that has become most emblematic of higher education's failure to teach critical-thinking skills to college students is Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011). The researchers found that college students make little gain in critical-thinking skills, as measured by students’ scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment. This study has been criticized for relying too much on the CLA, but that overlooks a much more fundamental issue underscored by a growing body of research: we don’t know what critical thinking actually is, and we can’t be sure that it even exists.

Higher Ed's Biggest Gamble
Whether we can actually teach students critical-thinking skills is one of the most overlooked and misunderstood issues in higher education today, argues John Schlueter.

Two recent reports by a prominent researcher purport to challenge Academically Adrift's underlying conclusions about students' critical thinking gains in college, and especially the extent to which others have seized on those findings to suggest that too little learning takes place in college. The studies by the Council for Aid to Education show that students taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment made an average gain of 0.73 of a standard deviation in their critical thinking scores, significantly more than that found by the authors of Academically Adrift.

"The notion that college doesn't matter is inaccurate," Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, said in an interview. (The council produces the CLA.) In the paper and a recent presentation of its data, Benjamin said that CAE's findings contrast with Academically Adrift's, though in the interview he sought to play down the extent to which his findings undermine those of the book.

Not much at all, one of the authors of Academically Adrift said in an e-mail message upon reviewing the CAE studies. Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, noted methodological differences in how the two sets of data were drawn -- most significantly that the CAE study does not follow the same group of students over time -- and questioned the figures from Academically Adrift that Benjamin used to draw his conclusions.

He also took issue with the suggestion that his study, with the University of Virginia's Josipa Roksa, questioned the contribution that college makes to student learning ("Neither Roksa nor I have made such a claim," he wrote) -- although certainly some of the book's champions have done so.

Less Academically Adrift?
Challenging findings of landmark 2011 study, new data suggest that college students make significantly bigger gains in critical thinking. But differences in methodology may contribute to the differing conclusions.

While the question of the use of cross-sectional data versus longitudinal is certainly a relevant one with respect to the relationship between the two studies, if the overall question is whether there is a correlation between being college educated and lack of religion, then in spite of that methodological flaw, the CAE study would seem to support that correlation and thus imply that there is evidence that people who have graduated reject religion in greater numbers due to improved thinking skills. It supports the inference, though admittedly it's far from conclusive.

The idea that highly educated people are less religious, on average, than those with less education has been a part of the public discourse for decades, but some scholars of religion have called this notion into question. 1 And a new analysis of Pew Research Center surveys shows that the relationship between religion and education in the United States is not so simple.

On one hand, among U.S. adults overall, higher levels of education are linked with lower levels of religious commitment by some measures, such as belief in God, how often people pray and how important they say religion is to them. On the other hand, Americans with college degrees report attending religious services as often as Americans with less education.

Moreover, the majority of American adults (71%) identify as Christians. And among Christians, those with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling, on average. In fact, highly educated Christians are more likely than less-educated Christians to say they are weekly churchgoers. 2

Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%).

Highly educated Americans also are less inclined than others to say they believe in God with absolute certainty and to pray on a daily basis. And, when asked about their religious identity, college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics (11% of college grads vs. 4% of U.S. adults with a high school education or less).

Pew Research Center || In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?