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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.
Depends on what offer they mean- the basics where it says the interest rate, or the 5 pages of legalese in the full contract. The second is hard unless you have experience in legalese.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My wife is a Graduate Student at one of the Ivies, and it is amazing how many of the students struggle with putting sentences together in their lab reports. We've found that they manage to construct some "sentences" that would make one of my elementary school teachers cry. It's amazing that these people have the SAT scores to attend this type of school. Apparently the SAT's verbal component doesn't measure ability to construct sentences.
So my boss was passing this article around a few days ago to make fun of one of our new hires. The new guy pointed out that all colleges are not equal. Strangely the study doesn't mention what schools were part of this survey. Does anyone know?
I mean, like read a -book- (that's not required for a course)?
I found that a great many folks (students, and in general) simply don't read anything that's outside of e/mail. That just means that, for the most part, they're -way- less `literate' than folks who do read books (for entertainment value).
And yes, `useless' novels do increase your literacy.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The bad news is that its not just college students. By the time that a student graduates high school, they should be able to do the things being tested here, never mind college. If all college is going to teach you is to function as well as someone with an 8th grade education 100 years ago, we have a really *REALLY* bad problem.
People, in general, are lazy, and learning to communicate is not a high priority for many. Learning to do many things is not a priority and until it is, they will not learn it. In all probability, some of those who can't make sense of credit card offers do know all the tricks for a dozen video games. I'm not saying that gamers are dumb, but that this demonstrates they are not stupid, just lazy.
The school system that my tax dollars help pay for should not cater to lazy students. They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can. So, with some trepidation that I've not considered every angle, I blame the school system(s) for the quality of graduates they produce. Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They always come out with some dire statistic proving that nobody reads, nobody understands math, etc. Its best to take it with a lot of salt, because these studies are probably financed by book publishers, or organizations that would benefit from higher investment in education.
I would question the benefits of education. The correlation between how much sex one and one's education is inversely proportional. Perhaps we should be celebrating how much more sex Americans are having thanks to the low-level of literacy.
but then, the purpose of educational theories since 1900 has not been to create a responsible independant thinking citizen. It has been to create whatever citizen was desirable at the time, be it a willing worker, or a willing consumer. The end result is that we are now reaching the end of the rope.
Teaching professionals advocate throwing Money at the problem, sort of like in the IBM commercials. When the problem is as ineffective technique. But the teachers are illiterate as well. No wonder some people throw their hands up and go for home schooling, or other solutions.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why is this supposed to be a test of literacy? It sounds more like they don't have much 'common sense', which is surely a good sign in an academic ;)
Note that this research comes from the Pew Charitable Trust, the same institution which told us that the gender gap is alive and well online, claiming that women use the Internet for socialising and that men use it for hunting down information. They are certainly making a lot of bold statements and getting themselves in the news.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
They can watch it, until it gets slashdotted.
2 0.wmv
/. effect takes over. :)
Mark Sanford (running for Gov.) got permission to put the show on his site at mms://sql2.slicker.com:1890/sanfordforgovernor/20
Good luck watching it until the
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
So ofcourse they try to make everyone pass.. nevermind the things they are supposed to be teaching.
I wonder if adults, tested to the same criteria as the posted article, would fare any better. Every generation has morons.
I couldn't find it eaisly on google, but I remember a recent article about college law professors reading standard credit card offers/agreements. They all came up with different interpretations from the agreements.
That's pretty sad when legal experts can't even agree on what they say.
BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.
Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...
Seen on Shacknews. I believe United States is also like this. Posted on AQFL.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I am a teacher :) I teach industrial design at an art and design school in the south. I have been continually impressed with the lack of basic reading, writing and grammar abilities of the kids coming out of high school. These kids write things like "new cents" instead of "nuisance" (among other travesties of misfortunate homonym usage), end sentences when they feel like it (often without a verb), and balk at the thought of a three page paper in 8 point font.
I suppose this is "to be expected": it's an art school, after all. However, my students excel at the type problems listed in the article (interpreting, analyzing, comparing and contrasting) : not only can they interpret things like exercise and blood pressure tables, they continually shatter my expectations when assigned the task of redesigning the 1099 tax form or visualizing the supply chain from raw material to mass produced object.
My point is, I guess, that these kids are absolutely and systematically awful at "traditional" skills of reading, writing, and rhetoric. They seem to have compensated for these issues, however, by learning to visually unravel problems and to solve them through less traditional methods. I don't think this is taught in high school, and so I'm left wondering two things: where do they learn these "innovative" problem solving methods, and what the fuck ARE they learning in high school?
I've always been very interested in this whole 'education is getting easier' thing. In the UK at least, the overall exam results seem to be getting higher each year - this leads to the inevitable accusations that the exams are getting easier. It makes sense - why would classes get collectively more intelligent year on year?
In education we accept that people can't just be getting inexplicably smarter, so the exams must be getting easier. In sports though, we happily accept that every year or so records get broken simply because the competitors are getting better. I can't see what it is that causes atheletes to improve persistantly and why that logic can't be applied to education. Obviously better equipment technology has some impact on sport, but then so does the internet on education. Trilingual 8 year olds are impressive, but in parts of continental Europe especially I'm sure they're not considered anything special.
I don't know whether people are getting more or less intelligent, maybe exams are getting easier, maybe not. What can be shown, however, is that humans are progressing in some areas, for one reason or another.
Then I must be an idiot too, because so far I perceived 0% APR to refer to the percentage rate. And from my experience so far it does not mean Above Prime Rate since I never had interest payed for credit under 0% APR. My guess is that only superscum loan sharks (say Ditech and the like loan consolidation crooks) use this trick. I doubt it is being used for your standard BoA/citibank/etc credit card offers.
>>and so on down the chain.
Well, heres a partial explanation right here. People tend to develop skills as they need them. 50+ years ago in the US by the time a man was 17 going on 18 he was considered an adult who would be entering the career of his life. In a couple years, if not already so, he would also get married. These people needed to know basic finance but also worked manual labor jobs.
Now its a bit different. We don't really consider 18 year olds adult in the same sense. Adulthood starts after college graduation. Now we dont enter careers until age 22-25 and get married in mid to late twenties. College finances are not real world finances. You're living off loans, your parents help you out, the state helps you out with aid, etc. So its not surprising that people who we rarely treat as adults act like children. They have no incentive to act otherwise and have no need.
This is not common outside the US but more common in developed western nations where economies demand people with college and post-college educations for jobs that pay (checked for inflation) what old manufacturing jobs paid.
Extended childhood and a case of arrested development is part of the price of an educated society that has moved away from manufacturing and into a service based economy it seems.
I think its being very disingenious to cry "Everyone is stupid nowadays" without look at the radical cultural changes from 50-100 years ago. 200+ years ago people werent getting any education outside a few years of schooling and were getting married at around 15-17 years old and working the rest of their days on the farm. If progress means a longer childhood period then so be it unless you want to be a farmhand or working a lathe for 50 years until retirement somewhere (outside of the western world).
The other is the SCAM some car sales lots pull. They hang the big sign out front or in the newspaper ad. Zero or 1% APR. Customer comes running in to take advantage of the deal and signs without reading the fine print on the loan. Surprise! The fine print read APR (above prime rate) So if the prime rate is 4.5% today. Customer just got jammed with finacing his car for 4.5% + Zero = 4.5% or 4.5% + 1% = 5.5%.
You can't tell me it doesn't exist. I've seen it too many times. Although the practice seems to have died down in the last few years, for a while that phrase was on every credit offer I received.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
When I was younger, I was raised in a household with a library. It wasn't a very big house, but the library room was important; this is where my dad would sit and read, and I could do so as well. It never had to be said directly to me (at least, not that I remember), I just understood that the books were important, they were there to be read, and that was an important way to learn about the world. The books were knowledge, and that knowledge was respected. Whenever we visited someone else's house, I would always look at their library, because my father said you can learn a lot about a person by seeing what kind of books they read. A house without books was not a home to me.
Now, I visit people living in McMansions in various parts of the US, and I find many of them have no library, even though there is far more room for one if they so chose. Not surprisingly, their kids have little interest in reading, because their parents don't read, yet are "successful" - i.e. they have the McMansion and stuff to fill it. What conclusion do you think most kids today will come to?
"Success" and education APPEAR more uncoupled in today's world than they used to be - and that is awfully hard for even the best teachers to overcome. The people who are drawn to knowledge for its own beauty have always been a very small minority; for the rest, education is interesting to the extent it is rewarding. If the rewards appear less, the education is less interesting and devolves into seeking the form (degrees) rather than the substance.
Btw, I used to tutor kids in their homes for many years, so I have some experience/bias when it comes to how kids are educated....
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.
"Indeed, it is wise never to consider any form of electronic data as final." --Arnold Robbins
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that it isn't accepted usage. The fact that it's only used by car salesman for confusion purposes would tend to support that, I think. It's a scam, period.
When dealing with the press sometimes you have to state the obvious. Even then they often fail to grasp the obvious.....
.....riiiiiiiiiiight
It called a rhetorical answer to a non-rhetorical question (aka dodging the question). They were asking a touch question about way the US has failed to get Osama, and Bush dodged the question and gave a childish answer.
I am one of those of the generation that grew up without computers. I seriously believe that learning to do maths by hand and read from a book and not a badly written sentence, edited for space by a semi-literate online author are the reasons I don't have these problems. Kids today are entirely helpless without computers (and judging by the quality of English on Slashdot they're helpess with them as well.)
Switch off the computer, take out a book on elementary algebra and one piece of good English fiction.
Apparently including journalists. In a move that should surprise nobody, the reporter who wrote the article doesn't seem to have bothered to look at the data, and relied on the pre-digested summary instead. If you bother to look at the Appendix to the report, which is just a few mouse clicks away for anyone who is interested, it turns out that the college students did substantially better than the population at large.
What's particularly interesting is that they also had a comparison of current college students with college graduates. The current students did better than graduates in all areas of the test. Their average scores were higher, a lower pecentage of them were in the lowest score categories, and a higher percentage were in the highest score categories, with the exception of one test where the 2 year college graduates managed a tie with the current 2 year students.
It would be at least as honest to report the results as saying that current college students are better equipped for daily life than the population at large. But that wouldn't be alarming enough. More importantly, it wouldn't play to the prejudices of the audience, who want to believe that things are going to hell.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'm a college student. I'd agree with most of the things you've said...to a point.
Fact is, most college students are NOT there to learn the various subjects they're signed up for. They just want the diploma, and the 4-5 year trip away from their parents is just part of it. They want to take that diploma and make lower middle income wages in some office. Not everyone is an intellectual interested in higher learning. For the most part, they're folks who want to make money, have fun, and enjoy life. If studying isn't what they enjoy, I wouldn't be suprised to find that they only study the minimum amount required.
For most students, college is just a phase of life that must be endured on the way towards the working world. The expectations stated in your first paragraph are still the goals for highschool to today(whether or not they're met). For people to make enough money to buy the lifestyle they want, businesses want a college degree as a minimum. High school used to be enough. College is the new minimum. The businesses will know what to expect from an undergrad student. When they want the self-propelled intellectuals, they hire on graduate students.
Those who personally enjoy knowledge(or want to qualify for that bigger paycheck), end up going on to do graduate work where they "learn to learn". Undergrad is for churning through basics, rote memorization gets the fundamental knowledge into their heads. Now with their fundamental knowledge they can begin to digest what information they're getting. They're learning to walk in undergrad, and learning to run as graduate students. The higher education experience of which you speak still remains in the form of graduate students.
As for myself, I find knowledge invigorating; it's an enjoyable diversion. I keep up with currents events, I buy history books on my own, I'm teaching myself a language. Small minor expansions of my educational horizons on my own time. However, the fact is that the bulk of my time is spent on maintaining that high GPA so that I can secure a good entry-level job with opportunities for advancement. Knowledge in and of itself is merely entertainment for a low-brow such as I. It will only receive as much focus as my primary commitments will allow. I am well aware of the "power" it has, and the liberating effects it has for the scholar. When we students do not pursue it, it's usually a choice that was made either consciously or subconsciously.
If you can find a car loan...or almost ANY loan for prime + 0, or prime + 1, take it. Thats an amazing rate, especially if you have bad credit. Hell, when I worked at a mortgage company, we wouldn't give you prime plus one unless your beacon score was well above 700...I know car loans are even worse (houses make equity/money as they age, cars....don't.)
People still get real educations abroad. My dad was transferred to India when I was in 8th grade and was transferred back last year - the family moved with him both times. Watching my brother struggle with the administration to take "advanced" courses made me thank my stars I was able to take the IB diploma with no hassle. That program is much like the one you describe, Shakespeare and poetry by grade nine (IB diploma is 11,12, but almost all the 9 and 10 systems have this) and calculus and basic modern algebra in grade 12.
But I needed a credit card to pay for it, because it was the only way I could pay that day. Accessibility is a huge issue. I agree with everything you said, I was just pointing out that having a credit card for emergencies can be really useful, and the GP had stated "if you need credit cards to pay for emergencies, you have a whole different set of problems that have nothing to do with credit card rates."
Credit cards are very useful tools. When I was younger and hardly had any savings credit cards bailed me out a few times because I couldn't budget properly and would be out of gas money before payday. They're great for businesses/governments to send their employees to conferences, meetings, etc. since they're much easier to use than company checks and make life easier for accounting. And I'll always carry one with a decent credit limit just in case something like my christmas emergency comes up again but for some reason I don't have access to my other accounts.
I agree with what you said, though. It's a huge poblem when the average american household has 15 credit cards and $7,000 in revolving (high interest) debt, although I guess it's representative of the current federal budget and mentality of most of the population...
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling