with critical thinking skills, most colleges today would get an f. we are joined by nyu professor and co-author of "academically adrift" richard aren. good morning. >> good morning. we don't find many kids like that today getting those kinds of grades. today, we would give them b's. >> in fact, you have suggested that maybe we need to give kids a ged test just to see what they know because some of the kids who didn't go to college are smarter than the kids who do. >> yeah, that proposal by clarence page is interesting and provocative. i do think that we need to move from just giving people paper degrees to assessing what they learn and seeing whether or not they can actually perform these basic competencies. >> if they're not learning critical thinking in college, what are they doing? >> well, in our study, we followed several thousand students. we found a third of them spending less than an hour a day