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College Students Lack Literacy
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that "more than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Patience... Not Literacy... It takes too much time to read the fine print on those damn offers... Kids these days are too busy getting drunk....
God Bless College Life
-nick
My wife is a graduate student at one of the local state schools here in Texas. And she tells me stories about students she has had that don't know how to use a ruler. A freaking ruler for crying out loud, I learned ruler 101 in 1st grade, after I stopped having to write with the giant pencils.
credit cards are unsecure loans, which means that they cannot take your property as collateral for unpaid debts.
chillax137
The 20/20 show was purely anecdotal, flawed reporting. But sensationalism sells, as the politician who has decided to put a copy up on his website demonstrates. It also fails to have any mention of the responsibility of parents in all of this. Or the kids. Or so-called NCLB using up funds to prepare students for standardized tests rather than actual learning. For example, it's not the teachers' unions' fault that school boards in certain parts of the country want to dumb-down the science curriculum in order to teach religion.
Hey. I know it's a joke, but the US has lots of tough colleges. The quality of secondary education may be bad, overall, but the US have some of the best colleges in the world. My university is one of the best public schools in the country, and its computer science department is well known. You should also remember universities such as Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech (among others), who will also give you an academic butt-whipping (at least in the engineering and science disciplines).
They were original used for motor homes, so that in case of an accident, rescuers knew to look for a baby. Things got a little out of hand afterwards, though.
How did you get from that story anything about the religion of the translator?
If you really are concerned about the harm done by the banking system, drop the anti-semetism.
It has not been relevant to discussions of banking since the 1600's. Even then it was the pope's fault that all the western-european bankers were jewish. It was illegal for any christian to engage in money lending for interest, and jewish people in western europe were barred from most other professions.
Since the invention of the corporation, most banks have been owned by shareholders of all religions.
I should have went to a US college.
The past participle of "to go" is "gone" rather than "went". The simple past tense and the past participle are the same in regular verbs, so mistakes with irregular verbs are inderstandable. Nevertheless, you should be using the past participle with the helper "have" for the conventional present perfect.
My other body is also not wearing any.
APR does stand for Annual Percentage Rate (maybe you should try reading one of your credit card statements sometime). The way most cards calculate it, however, is by tacking a number onto the prime rate. For instance, a card will have an APR that is 4 above prime (currently 3.99, I believe). The rate on that card would be listed as 7.99%. If the prime rate changes, the card company will be able to adjust your rate at a fixed time interval (3 months, 6 months, 1 year, etc), depending on the agreement.
This guy's the limit!
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant?
Yes. It's called my cellphone.
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's just backed up on tape somewhere."
That 20/20 piece was put together by that Solomon of objective journalism, none other than John Stossel. For those just tuning in, John Stossel is a shill for free-market fundamentalist pet causes. What he does is PR, not investigation.
Diction nazi, not grammar nazi. ;-)
I hadn't heard of any studies being done to examine the literacy required to do things like "understand credit card applications". I was, however, aware of the astonishing fact that MANY current college students will go the rest of their lives without ever again reading a book. This research came out maybe 4 years ago indicating that in fact MOST college students (something on the order of 60%) go through school, even graduate with high marks and honors, without ever reading a book. Additionally, it was reported that many of these non-readers would in fact live out the rest of their lives without ever reading a book.
Maybe I lack numeric literacy (numeracy?), but shouldn't 13.7 + 7 be 20.7, not 19.7? You just shorted your server a buck...
You would be surprised. Remember, your typical American ruler is broken into binary fractions of an inch (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and usually 1/16 is the smallest). In order to measure something to less than a whole inch, you have to be familiar with those fractions, how they convert, how to count them, and so forth. I can personally attest to the fact that many kids have no idea what exactly all the submarkings below an inch mean. They have a hard time memorizing the powers of two, which you probably take for granted, so they have to count how many marks there are to know the denominator of the fraction, remember that, then recount how many marks they move over to the edge of the thing they are measuring.
Sounds complicated when you describe it like this, doesn't it? You probably learned it at such a young age that you don't remember a time when it didn't make sense or you had to think about it.
Another sign of this is a somewhat new breakdown in the clothing and fashion industry. It used to be that there were just Fashion Designers, who controlled the making of a garment from mental conception all the way to the fractions of an inch, stitches per inch, seam width, etc., that were given to the manufacturers of garments. Nowadays, there are Fashion Designers, and Tech Designers. The Fashion Designer has the "creative" part, and the Tech designer is the one who translates that into inches, stitches, fabrics and so forth! In other words, the ability to handle numbers, fractions, and measurements is now considered difficult enough to render a new job position. I know this because my mother has been in the garmento industry for 40+ years. She is now a tech designer, because nobody wants to do that icky math stuff; all the FIT graduates want to be "creative" designers. Not suprisingly, tech designers typically get paid about 2 to 3 times more than fashion designers.
No, it doesn't help your credit rating to carry a balance.
Your FICO score (http://www.fairisaac.com/) is determined by 3 factors:
1) the length of your credit history
2) how many of your payments are on time or late
3) the ratio of how much debt/credit you have
Only paying part of your balance will hurt #3. It will not help you in any way.
you're thinking of an episode of frontgline wgere law professors were stumped. You can watch online or read the text.I'll save you the trouble and link it.