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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.
I, for one, am not surprised. I never read __less__ books in my life than when I was in college. I was much too busy trying to get the course busy-work done to do any reading, or much learning for that matter.
15-20 years ago a guy working on his PhD told me that that getting a PhD had become like getting a MA or MS had been a generation earlier, getting a MA/MS like getting a BA/BS had been, getting a BA/BS like graduating from high school had been, and so on down the chain.
I've always been tempted to dismiss that as just a "back in my day" story about walking to school in a snowstorm, but it's hard to dismiss certain facts. For example, Robert Graves tells us in his biography that when he an ~8 year old, about 100 years ago, he was "doing ok with Latin, but having trouble with Greek".
And now people are having trouble with their own native language when they graduate from college...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
___Fewer___ books, dammit.
Take a US college course online. I work with people bragging about how they're going to have a college degree soon and they know it's utter bullshit. The classes are practically impossible to fail from what I've seen (yet somehow people are failing them anyway).
When some of my friends say they will have "earned" their right to have a better job, I laugh at them. I laugh because they haven't earned anything. I tell them they haven't learned anything. They haven't even been to college. They simply bought a degree online. That is practically all it is. Buying a degree. No longer are you required to actually learn. It's similar to how high school has become daycare. "No need to learn anything in highschool, you can buy your education online later. Hope you can read tho. LMAO LOL!"
(Disclaimer: This specifically refers to the online courses in my area, and may not apply to whatever college you take online classes with.)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
> Patience... Not Literacy... It takes too much time to read the fine print on those damn offers...
And it may be the case that sometimes companies don't want you to understand an offer very well.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you've gotten a credit card offer recently, there's a medium-sized standard box they include on the black-and-white legalese page which tells you the real (not introductory) interest rate, for instance.
Despite this, some people will briefly glance at the color glossy flyer, see "ZERO PERCENT (introductory) INTEREST!" and be shocked, yes, shocked, when the rates hop to twenty-seven percent or something ridiculous like that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
No one ever ends a rant on education with IANATeacher. Why is that?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
To be fair, I think that quite a bit of that came from a certain physics professor that I had. He was the head of the department, and I ended up getting him for about 8 of the physics classes that I took. He expected you to understand every nuance of what you had studied, and to understand it *completely*. Often he would ask questions that were seemingly impossible to solve, but if you looked at what he gave you and gave it enough thought, you would find that in every case he had given you everything you needed to know - even if it wasn't obvious that he had.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Perhaps life is more complex nowadays? I don't think a person living 100 years ago needed to learn even a tenth of what people need to learn today just to get by. So maybe people aren't lazy, but rather stressed and distracted, causing some "basic" stuff becomes down-prioritized. People today are all too aware of the possibilities of action and knowledge in the world, possibilities that -- if realised -- would take up countless life times. I know it stresses me out, and I think it is a problem humanity will eventually have to deal with.
I question that, actually. I've *never* seen APR stand for "Above Prime Rate." And if they use it to stand for that they're morons, as that would be insanely confusing.
Precisely; I was thinking that the really shocking way to have spun this story would have been: "Credit card offers are written in such complex English that they are unintelligible to 75% of college students".