:: Running from the Thought Police ::

:: Friday, January 20, 2006 ::

I Could've Told Them That

A recent study has found that most college graduates are idiots.

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, a study found.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

My personal thought is that most of these deficiencies aren't the fault of colleges at all - these are things a high school graduate should be able to do. Improving the rigor of college courses, as suggested by someone later in the article, would only do so much to help if the root problem stems from what students are or aren't being taught before they graduate high school.

:: The Squire 2:45 PM :: email this post :: ::
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