Posted on 01/21/2006 10:26:44 AM PST by voletti
WASHINGTON: More than half of students at four-year colleges in the United States - 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. “It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they’re not going to be able to do those things,” said Stephane Baldi, the study’s director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization. Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map. There was brighter news. Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytimes.com.pk ...
AP exagerrating for efect as usual? Why not take the logical next step and lay blame where it is due, namely the lib-dominated school system?
That's why there are liberals in the world. Reason and logic are not taught anymore.
It becomes clear why the members of the media are less able to evaluate issues and what to print.
Which is why one of the first things every college freshman sees when arriving on campus is a credit card company's pitchman.
It's only proof of the equivalent of a 6th grade education from 1950.
Yes, we MUST blame it on the government schools which have allowed this decline.
i kant uderstood a word off these article
They got that right.
I'm a professional writer and as the years go by more and more people think I'm some kind of genius for being able to put words to paper, that evoke feelings and emotions or biting satire that makes people think. I suspect that in my parents' generation I would have been just an average writer.
Dumber and dumber...I fear for our nation's future.
Not to worry, they can always get a job as a "journalist" with the Associated Press.
And to think, all of those foreign students are wasting their money coming to the U.S. to get their degrees.
This...like...article is like...umm, like...aahsumlee over-exaggerating, mannn!
I would be willing to wager well that the number of foreign students coming here to study the kinds of things that US students prefer - political science, history, social "sciences", and all those other fields where there is no way to quantify how much someone has learned is quite small.
Foreign students come to study engineering, mathematics, hard sciences, medicine - the few exceptions to the higher-education scam.
I can't tell you how many people I know who have completely useless Political Science degrees.
Of course you're right. But college is like anything else, you pays your money and your chance.
College isn't a vocational school. They don't exist to insure employment. On the other hand, a college education is now the minimum for any kind of white collar, inside sitting down job.
OK Pakistan. Keep telling yourselves that the US is a bunch of morons.
But at least US students can CHOOSE to seek higer education in much higher per capita numbers. While college-aged Pakistanis are illiterate due to social-class discrimination and gender discrimination.
Poli Sci, Sociology, Womyn's Studies,African-American Studies etc etc etc. Useless fields of study in my opinion.....
I think this is an AP article, not Pakistan's.
Poli Sci, Sociology, Womyn's Studies,African-American Studies etc etc etc. Useless fields of study in my opinion.....
For people who want to learn about those things, they're of value. Unfortunately, they are of little value in the workplace.
It's on a Pakistani newspaper site.
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