Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.