A college education bestows not just cognitive skills—mathematical, historical, and scientific knowledge—but practical skills—social, emotional, and behavioral competencies. Tenacious, confident, and socially competent employees have an edge over equally cognitively talented employees who lack those practical skills.…. One might argue that these skills are most appropriately learned at home, not in college. But here is where inequality rears its ugly head.

The large gaps in our records highlight the social historian's obligation to reconstruct the past with imagination, even with artistic creativity, but constrained from flights of pure fantasy by the authenticating conventions of scholarship. Imagination is needed, not merely to fill the gaps in our sources, but also to provide the framework, the master picture into which the jigsaw fragments of evidence can be fitted.

Doing both is not possible, by definition. Instead, states need to move consciously and systematically to the information economy’s emerging and increasingly dominant model of education, which will prevail in the future. The Carnegie Unit will pass into history.

If we really wish to graduate knowledgeable students with the aspiration to know more, time, which the Carnegie report calls “an often undervalued component of equal educational opportunity,” matters very much. In other words, whether we get rid of the credit hour or not, we need to ensure that all American college students have devoted, sustained time to work under the guidance of faculty members.

In fact, recent experiments provide strong evidence that multitasking is counterproductive, particularly when at least one of the tasks involves higher-level conceptual learning. As one Wall Street Journal columnist quips, multitasking is “the wellspring of office gaffes, as well as the stock answer to how we do more with less when in fact we’re usually doing less with more. What now passes for multitasking was once called not paying attention.” The most convincing of these recent studies succeeded in exposing three fundamental myths that have arisen about the virtues of multitasking.