I've blogged before about the slack skills of today's college students: teachers and business leaders are worried. With funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, The American Institutes For Research has investigated literacy among four-year college students nearing the end of their studies. It turns out we're graduating some fairly dim bulbs these days. More in this AP report:

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not 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. 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.

"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. "....do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group. "This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don't do it," Finney said. "States have no idea about the knowledge and skills of their college graduates."

The survey examined college and university students nearing the end of their degree programs. The students did the worst on matters involving math, according to the study. Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills. Baldi and Finney said the survey should be used as a tool. They hope state leaders, educators and university trustees will examine the rigor of courses required of all students.

Michael Kryzanek would like that. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed titled "Dumbing Down A College Education," he observed:

A recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read a ''complex book and extrapolate from it." Furthermore, the study found that far fewer college graduates are leaving school with ''the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity."....I would be lying to you if I said that I was surprised by the data. My more than 30 years of teaching in higher education at Bridgewater State College and elsewhere, and frequent discussions with colleagues from a wide range of colleges and universities, both public and private, tell me the findings are accurate. That only 31 percent of the college graduates qualified as ''proficient" in reading and understanding information is sad but all too believable.

The United States is recognized as having the world's best system of higher education, but that does not mean that the system is graduating students who are prepared to understand the world or, more importantly, have benefited from the wisdom of the greater thinkers, writers, scientists, and historians while they were occupying space in classrooms.

In coming decades our white-collar workforce and innovators will have to face hungrier and better-educated competitors from India, Ireland, Israel and Istanbul. We'll need MORE top-level players, who not only have killer business instincts, but know readin' writin' and 'rithmatic, too. To ramp up the volume will require more rigor in K-12 and higher education. Far easier said than done, but it all goes back to curricula.

TECHNORATI TAGS: COLLEGE STUDENTS, SKILLS, READING COMPREHENSION, MATH, WRITING, GLOBAL ECONOMY, RIGOR

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 19, 2006 05:19 PM