Hal,
There is more distressing news on the literacy front.
At the lower end of the prose literacy assessment, we find that 14 percent of college graduates have only “basic” literacy, and 3 percent are “below basic.”
You might well ask, what are people with such weak literacy doing in college at all — much less graduating?
The NAAL also studied two other aspects of literacy, the ability to understand documents and the ability to perform quantitative tasks. The former involves things like comprehending a bus schedule; the latter involves basic mathematical problems such as figuring how many cans of paint you’d need to buy to paint a room with so many square feet of wall area.
In document literacy, only 25 percent of college grads were deemed proficient. (BTW, the level of competence needed to make it to the “proficient” category isn’t particularly high. Around 70% was good enough.) At the bottom end, 11 percent were at “basic” and 2 percent “below basic.” The study doesn’t try to peg what “basic” means, but I’d say that a decently-educated fourth grader would be there.
In quantitative literacy, 31 percent of college grads were deemed “proficient,” the same as for prose literacy; 22 percent could only manage “basic” and 4 percent “below basic.”
What it means is that colleges and universities admit a lot of students who are shockingly weak in the most fundamental skills and that many of them can coast through to their degrees without substantially improving.
I have read that some employers don’t just want to see that applicants have the obligatory BA, but now also want to see what their SAT scores were. That’s evidence that the business world is figuring out that merely having a degree these days is not good proof of one’s trainability.
