B.A. has a new meaning — “below average” — according to a recent survey demonstrating that colleges pay far more attention to their business models than to their students’ academic achievements:
CNN: Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks
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.
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.
It’s tempting to distrust this study, except that too many of us have seen firsthand the caliber of college students these days.
Abysmally low expectations for college entry and performance is the inevitable result when the financial bottom line is prioritized over actual learning. Dormitories have never been nicer; campus life has never been more active; actual study time has never been lower.
Americans are marketing the college “experience” to the point of ignoring student performance — and our society will pay the price. Think the Chinese are making the same mistake?
