EDITORIAL: Poorly Educated College Students

By The Macon Telegraph, Ga.

Jan. 22–A study of U.S. college students offers some very disappointing conclusions. At best the findings point to an urgent need to retool classroom instruction; at worst it suggests a high percentage of college graduates will not be able to properly cope with common problems people encounter upon entering the real world.

The two-year old study, intended to test students’ ability to deal with complex but common tasks, found that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges and 75 percent of those at two-year colleges lacked the skills to understand and perform complex literary tasks. These include being able to understand news reports or to compare credit card offers that involve different interest rates. It also was an indicator whether or not a student can balance a checkbook, understand a document, calculate a restaurant tip or compare prices of competing items in a grocery store.

The study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, administered the National Assessment of Adult Literacy test to a representative sample of 1,827 students at public and private colleges. This is the test that, when given to adults, showed that about one in 20 adults is not literate in English. A mildly bright spot was that college students are more literate than the general adult population. However, the adult population includes those with much less education, the Associated Press story pointed out.

What the study shows is that there is a strong relationship between “analytic coursework and literacy.” In other words, students fare better after attending colleges that require them to take courses that challenge them to apply theories to practical problems, or to compare and weigh competing arguments.

One should draw the conclusion that many college students are arriving on campus ill-prepared to deal with routine problems. This points to a failure of high schools to arm college-bound students with the training they need to apply conceptual thinking to real-world situations.

This study should sound alarm bells not only for America’s colleges but for high schools as well.

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