Piaget changed our understanding of cognitive development by recognizing that maturation does not simply add knowledge; it allows a leap forward at each stage, first from sensorimotor to preoperational because of language (symbolic thought), and then with more advanced logical operations, from preoperational to concrete to formal (analytic).

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Many cognitive psychologists find that post-adolescent thinking is also distinct from earlier thought. Adults are more practical and flexible, finding a way to combine intuitive and analytic thought. This advance may begin in emerging adulthood.

Some developmentalists propose a fifth stage, called postformal thought, a “type of logical, adaptive problem–solving that is a step more complex than scientific formal-level Piagetian tasks” (Sinnott, 2014, p. 3). As one group of scholars explained, in postformal thought “one can conceive of multiple logics, choices, or perceptions . . . in order to better understand the complexities and inherent biases in ‘truth’” (Griffin et al., 2009, p. 173).

As you remember from Chapter 9, adolescents use two modes of thought (dual processing) but have difficulty combining them. They use formal analysis to learn science, distill principles, develop arguments, and resolve the world’s problems. Alternatively, they think spontaneously and emotionally about personal issues, such as what to wear, whom to befriend, whether to skip class. For personal issues, they prefer quick actions and reactions, only later realizing the consequences.

Postformal thinkers are less impulsive and reactive. They take a more flexible and comprehensive approach, with forethought, noting difficulties and anticipating problems, instead of denying, avoiding, or procrastinating. As a result, postformal thinking is more practical, creative, and imaginative than thinking in previous cognitive stages (Wu & Chiou, 2008). It is particularly useful in human relationships (Sinnott, 2014).

As you have read, some, but certainly not all, developmentalists dispute Piaget’s stage theory of childhood cognition. The ranks of dissenters swell regarding this fifth stage. As two scholars writing about emerging adulthood ask, “Who needs stages anyway?” (Hendry & Kloep, 2011).

Piaget himself never used the term postformal. If the definition of cognitive stage is to attain a new set of intellectual abilities (such as the symbolic use of language that distinguishes sensorimotor from preoperational thought), then adulthood has no stages.

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However, the prefrontal cortex is not fully mature until the early 20s, and new dendrites connect throughout life. As more is understood about brain development after adolescence, it seems likely that thinking changes as the brain matures. Of course, maturation never works alone. Several studies find that adult cognition benefits from the varied experiences of the social world beyond home and neighborhood that typically occur during emerging adulthood (Sinnott, 2014).

Piaget may have envisioned a fifth stage, according to one scholar:

we hypothesize that there exists, after the formal thinking stage, a fifth stage of post-formal thinking, as Piaget had already studied its basic forms and would have concluded the same thing, had he the time to do so.

[Lemieux, 2012, p. 404]

COUNTERING STEREOTYPES Cognitive flexibility, particularly the ability to change childhood assumptions, helps counter stereotypes. Young adults show many signs of such flexibility. The very fact that emerging adults did marry later than previous generations shows that, couple by couple, thinking is not determined by childhood culture or by traditional norms. Early experiences are influential, but postformal thinkers are not stuck by them.

Research on racial prejudice is another example. Many people are less prejudiced than their parents. This is a cohort change. However, emerging adults may overestimate the change. Tests often reveal implicit discrimination. Thus, many adults have both unconscious prejudice and rational tolerance—a combination that illustrates dual processing.

The wider the gap between explicit and implicit, the stronger the stereotypes (Shoda et al., 2014). Ideally, postformal reasoning allows rational thinking to overcome emotional reactions, with responses dependent on reality, not stereotypes (Sinnott, 2014). A characteristic of adult thinking may be the flexibility that allows recognition and reconciliation of contradictions, thus reducing prejudice.

Unfortunately, many young people do not recognize their own stereotypes, even when false beliefs harm them. One of the most pernicious results is stereotype threat, arising in people who worry that other people might judge them as stupid, lazy, oversexed, or worse because of their ethnicity, sex, age, or appearance.

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The idea is that people have a stereotype that other people have a stereotype. Then the possibility of being stereotyped arouses emotions and hijacks memory, disrupting cognition (Schmader, 2010). That is stereotype threat, as further explained below.

A major reason why emerging adulthood has become a new period of development, when people postpone the usual markers of adult life (marriage, a steady job), is that many older adolescents seek further education instead of taking on adult responsibilities.

MASSIFICATION There is no dispute that tertiary education improves health and wealth. The data on virtually every physical condition, and every indicator of material success, show that college graduates are ahead of high school graduates, who themselves are ahead of those without a high school diploma. This is apparent even when the comparisons are between students of equal ability: It’s the education, not just the potential, that makes a difference.

Because of that, every nation has increased the number of college students. This is a phenomenon called massification, based on the idea that college could benefit almost everyone (the masses) (Altbach et al., 2010).

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The United States was the first major nation to endorse massification, with state-funded universities in all 50 states, often more than one per state (California has 36). That is why, among older adults, the United States leads in the percentage of college graduates.

Recently, however, other nations have increased public funding for college while the United States has decreased it. As a result, eleven other nations have a higher proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who are college graduates (OECD, 2014). The decline in massification in the United States is the reason for “declining living standards . . . [and] wages for many Americans” according to one analysis (Greenstone & Looney, 2012, p. 32).

U.S. Census data and surveys of individuals find that college education pays off for individuals as well as for societies more than it did 30 years ago. The average college man earns an additional $17,558 per year compared to a high school graduate. Women also benefit, but not as much, earning $10,393 more per year (Autor, 2014). That higher salary is averaged over the years of employment: Most new graduates do not see such a large wage difference; but in a decade or two, the differences are dramatic.

The reasons for the gender gap are many. Some observers blame culture, some blame employers, and others blame the women themselves, who are less likely to demand more pay. Even among contemporary emerging adults, women seem to undervalue their worth (stereotype threat again). This was one conclusion of a series of experiments with college students in which women were more likely to attribute success of a team project to a male partner than to themselves (Haynes & Heilman, 2013).

DEBTS AND DROPOUTS The typical American with a master’s degree earns twice as much as the typical one with only a high school diploma (Doubleday, 2013) (see Figure 11.3), but most U.S. adults believe that college is too expensive. According to a survey, 94 percent of parents expect their children to go to college, but 75 percent of the public (parents or not) believe that college costs are beyond what most parents can afford (Pew Research Center, May 17, 2012).

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The longitudinal data make it clear that a college degree is worth the expense and that investing in college education returns the initial expense more than five times. That means if a student spends a nickel now, they get a quarter back in a few years, or if a degree costs $200,000, over a lifetime the return is a million dollars.

However, there is a major problem with that calculation. Although most freshmen expect to graduate, many of them leave college before graduating. Some income benefits come from simply attending college, but most result from earning a degree. Yet the costs come from enrolling, not from graduating, so the benefits may be far less than the million dollars mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Statistics on college graduation are discouraging. Even six years after entering a college designed to award a bachelor’s degree after four years of study, less than half the students graduate. Data from 2013 find that only 34 percent of the students at private, for-profit colleges earn a degree; at public institutions, the six-year graduation rate is 50 percent; at private, nonprofit colleges, 58 percent (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014).

Ironically, schools with the lowest graduation rates are the most popular: 2,352,054 students attend for-profit colleges, 1,111,151 public colleges, and 814,598 private, nonprofit colleges. The reasons may be the marketing efforts of the for-profit schools, which are designed to appeal to the emotional, intuitive thinking of the adolescent, not the logical reflection of the adult.

The sad truth is that many freshmen will be disappointed: Almost all (88 percent) expect to earn a degree in four years, and many (76 percent) expect a master’s or professional degree after completing their bachelor’s (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014). Rates of completed advanced degrees are also discouraging.

One effort to improve graduation rates is to make college loans easier to obtain so that fewer students leave because they cannot afford college or because their paid job interferes with study time. However, for some emerging adults, paying back loans is a major burden, especially because interest on those loans is high. Many analysts question the impact of such loans, which may burden students, taxpayers, and society without increasing graduation rates or employment prospects (Best & Best, 2014; Webber, 2015).

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Nonetheless, every study over the past several decades reaches the same conclusion: When 18-year-old high school graduates of similar backgrounds and abilities are compared, those who enter the labor market rather than pursuing higher education eventually achieve less and are less satisfied by middle age than those who earned a college degree (Hout, 2012).

The financial benefits of college seem particularly strong for ethnic minorities and low-income families. Ironically, they are least likely to enter college or earn a degree, but most likely to benefit when they do so.

COLLEGE AND COGNITION For developmentalists interested in cognition, the crucial question about college education is not about wealth, health, rates, expense, or even graduation. Instead, developmentalists wonder whether college advances critical thinking and postformal thought. The answer seems to be yes, but some studies dispute that.

Let us begin with the classic work of William Perry (1981, 1970/1998). After repeatedly questioning students at Harvard, Perry described students’ thinking through nine levels of complexity over the four years that led to a bachelor’s degree (see Table 11.2).

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Perry found that freshmen arrived thinking in a simplistic dualism. Most tended to think in absolutes, believing that things were either right or wrong. Answers to questions were yes or no, the future led to success or failure, and the job of the professor (Authorities) was to distinguish between the two and then tell the students.

By the end of college, Perry’s subjects believed strongly in relativism, recognizing that many perspectives might be valid and that almost nothing was totally right or wrong. But they were able to overcome that discouraging idea: They had become critical thinkers, realizing that they needed to move forward in their lives by adopting one point of view, yet expecting to change their thinking if new challenges and experiences produced greater insight.

Perry found that the college experience itself caused this progression: Peers, professors, books, and class discussion all stimulated new questions and thoughts. Other research confirmed Perry’s conclusions. In general, the more years of higher education a person had, the deeper and more postformal that person’s reasoning became (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991).

CURRENT CONTEXTS But wait. You probably noticed that Perry’s study was first published decades ago. Hundreds of other studies in the twentieth century also found that college deepens cognition. Since you know that cohort and culture are influential, you are right to wonder whether those conclusions still hold in the twenty-first century.

Many recent books criticize college education on exactly those grounds. Notably, a twenty-first-century longitudinal study of a cross section of U.S. college students found that students’ growth in critical thinking, analysis, and communication over the four years of college was only half as much as among college students two decades ago. This analysis of the first two years of college found that 45 percent of the students made no significant advances at all (Arum & Roksa, 2011).

The reasons were many. Compared to decades ago, students study less, professors expect less, and students avoid classes that require reading at least 40 pages a week or writing 20 pages a semester. Administrators and faculty still hope for intellectual growth, but rigorous classes are canceled, not required, or taken by only a few.

A follow-up study of the same individuals after graduation found that those who spent most of their college time socializing rather than studying were likely to be unemployed or have low-income jobs. What they had gained from college was a sense that things would get better, but not the critical-thinking skills or the self-discipline that is needed for adult success (Arum & Roksa, 2014).

Other observers blame the exosystem for forcing colleges to follow a corporate model with students as customers who need to be satisfied rather than youth who need to be challenged (Deresiewicz, 2014). Customers, apparently, demand dormitories and sports facilities that are costly, and students take out loans to pay for them. The fact that the United States has slipped in massification is not surprising, given the political, economic, and cultural contexts of contemporary college.

A related development is that U.S. young adults are less proficient in various skills, including reading comprehension, problem solving, and especially math, according to international tests (see Figure 11.4). A report highlighting those results is particularly critical of the disparity in education between the rich and the poor, stating “to put it bluntly, we no longer share the growth and prosperity of the nation the way we did in the decades between 1940 and 1980” (Goodman et al., 2015, p. 2).

Two new pedagogical techniques may foster greater learning, or may be evidence of the decline of standards. One is called the flipped class, in which students are required to watch videos of a lecture on their computers or other devices before class. They then use class time for discussion, with the professor prodding and encouraging but not lecturing.

The other technique is classes that are totally online, including massive open online courses (MOOCs). A student can enroll in such a class and do all the work off campus. Among the advantages of MOOCs is that students can be anywhere.

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For example, MOOCs have enrolled students who are: in rural areas far from college; unable to leave home because they have young children or mobility problems; serving in the armed forces far from college; living in countries with few rigorous or specialized classes. The first MOOC offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard enrolled 155,000 students from 194 nations, including 13,044 from India (Breslow et al., 2013).

Only 4 percent of the students in that first MOOC completed the course. Completion rates have risen in later courses, but almost always the dropout rate is over 80 percent. Researchers agree that “learning is not a spectator sport,” that active engagement, not merely clicking on a screen, is needed for education. Although MOOCs are attractive for many reasons, colleges are wary of “knee-jerk reactions and bandwagon-jumping,” as one article explained (Kolowich, 2013).

The crucial variable may be the students. MOOCs are most successful if students are highly motivated, adept at computer use, and have the needed prerequisites (Reich, 2015). That first MIT course had many enrollees who did not have the necessary math skills (Breslow et al., 2013).

Students learn best in MOOCs if they have another classmate, or an expert, as a personal guide. This is true for all kinds of college learning: Face-to-face interaction seems to improve motivation and learning. As developmentalists find for every emerging adult, challenging conversations and new experiences advance cognition.

MOTIVATION TO ATTEND COLLEGE Motivation is crucial for every intellectual accomplishment. An underlying problem in the controversy about college education is that people disagree about its purpose, and thus, students who are motivated to accomplish one thing clash with professors who are motivated to teach something else. Parents and governments who subsidize college may have a third goal in mind.

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Developmentalists, most professors, and many college graduates believe that the main purpose of higher education is “personal and intellectual growth,” which means that professors should focus on fostering critical thinking and analysis. However, adults who have never attended college believe that “acquiring specific skills and knowledge” is more important. For them, success is a high-paying job.

In the Arum and Roksa report (2011), students majoring in business and other career fields were less likely to gain in critical thinking compared to those in the liberal arts (courses that demand more reading and writing). These researchers suggest that colleges, professors, and students themselves who seek easier, more popular courses are short-changing themselves for future maturity and success (Arum & Roksa, 2014).

However, many students attend college primarily for career reasons (see Figure 11.5). They want jobs with good pay; they select majors and institutions accordingly, not for intellectual challenge and advanced communication skills. Business has become a popular major. Professors are critical when college success is measured via the future salaries of graduates, but that metric may be what the public expects. Cohorts clash.

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In 1955, most U.S. colleges were four-year institutions, and most students majored in the liberal arts. There were only 275 “junior” colleges. In 2014, there were almost 1,920 such colleges, now often called community colleges. (Some of these also offer four-year degrees, but their primary focus is on two-year associate degrees.) Similarly, for-profit colleges were scarce until about 1980; now the United States has more than 752, far more than two decades ago but nonetheless fewer than four years ago (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014).

No nation has reached consensus on the purpose of college. For example in China, where the number of college students now exceeds the U.S. number (but remember that the Chinese population is much larger), the central government has fostered thousands of new institutions of higher learning. The main reason is to provide more skilled workers for economic advancement, not to deepen intellectual understanding and critical thinking. However, even in that centralized government, disagreement about the goals and practices of college is evident (Ross & Wang, 2013).

For example, in 2009, a new Chinese university (called South University of Science and Technology of China, or SUSTC) was founded to encourage analysis and critical thinking. SUSTC does not require prospective students to take the national college entry exam (Gao Kao); instead, “creativity and passion for learning” are the admission criteria (Stone, 2011, p. 161).

It is not clear whether SUSTC is successful, again because people disagree about how to measure success. The Chinese government praises SUSTC’s accomplishments but has not replicated it (Shenzhen Daily, 2014).

One development of the twenty-first century has the potential to advance cognition on many levels. As a result of globalization, more young people live in cities and travel to new nations, meeting people of various ethnicities and cultures. In many ways, colleges are more diverse than they once were, places where some students meet their first atheist, or immigrant, or person whose ancestors came from Africa, or Asia, or South America.

DIVERSITY IN COLLEGE The most obvious diversity in colleges worldwide is gender: In 1970, at least two-thirds of college students were male, often educated in exclusively male institutions. Now, in every developed nation (except Germany), more than half the college students are female, with women enrolled in every class, including physics and engineering.

A historic example is Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a state-supported military academy that had never admitted women since its founding in 1839. Administrators at the college said that women could not do the physical tasks required at VMI, and besides, no woman would want to be an army officer. However, in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (7-1) that, as a public institution, it could not discriminate based on sex alone. In 2015, 11 percent (about 185) of the VMI students are female.

In addition to gender diversity, students’ ethnic, economic, religious, and cultural backgrounds are more varied. Compared to 1970, more students are parents, are older than age 24, are of non-European heritage, attend school part-time, and live and work off campus. This is true not only in North America but also worldwide.

In the United States, when undergraduate and graduate students are tallied by ethnicity, 35 percent are “minorities” of some kind (Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, two or more races). Faculty members are also more diverse; 19 percent are non-White (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014).

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These numbers overstate diversity: It is not true that most colleges are a third minority. Instead, some colleges are almost exclusively minority (usually only one minority, as with historically African American or Native American colleges). Many other colleges are almost entirely European American, as are most tenured professors. Further, the typical college student is still 18 to 22 years old and attends college full-time. Nonetheless, almost every institution of higher education is more diverse than it was 50 years ago.

DIVERSITY AS THOUGHT-PROVOKING Diversity of any kind can advance cognition. Honest conversations among people of different backgrounds and varied perspectives lead to intellectual challenge and deeper thought, with the benefits lasting for years after graduation (Pascarella et al., 2014).

Colleges that make use of their diversity—via curriculum, assignments, discussions, cooperative education, learning communities, and so on—stretch student understanding, not only of other people but also of themselves (Harper & Yeung, 2013).

Such advances are not guaranteed. Emerging adults, like people of every age, tend to feel most comfortable with people who agree with them. Critical thinking develops outside the personal comfort zone, when cognitive dissonance requires deeper thought.

Regarding colleges, some people hypothesize that critical thinking is less likely to develop when students enroll in colleges near home or when they join fraternities or sororities. However, that hypothesis does not seem valid (Martin et al., 2015).

The crucial factor seems to be honest talk with a peer who differs in background and values, and that can happen in many places—a college classroom, a sports event, a work project, or a fraternity dining room. It is less likely to happen with parents in an emerging adult’s childhood home. Most young people leave their childhood home to study, work, and travel, and for that reason emerging adulthood often entails intellectual growth.

Again, meeting people who are from various backgrounds is a first step. For cognitive development to occur, the willingness to listen to someone with opinions unlike one’s own, and to modify one’s own thinking accordingly, is crucial. That openness, and flexibility, is characteristic of postformal thought.

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The validity of this conclusion is illustrated by the remarkable acceptance of homosexuality over the past 50 years, not only in recognition of marriage but in everything from bullying in middle school to adoption of children by gay and lesbian parents. Fourteen percent of Americans—including religious believers and African Americans who historically rejected homosexuals—have changed their minds.

The main reason that individuals became more accepting of homosexuality is that people realized that they knew LGBT people personally (Pew Research Center, March 20, 2013). That occurred not only because people were more open about their sexual orientation but also because young adults in particular spoke with their LGBT peers. The research finds that those in the vanguard of this social revolution were emerging adults, for all the reasons just described about cognitive development.