http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060119/...ltBHNlYwM3MTY-
"Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
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."
I'd like to have seen stats on those who have graduated as opposed to those just attending college, as I suspect quite a few are just paying colleges for the privilege to attend and not making real progress toward a degree.
"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."
It's tempting to make fun of these people, but these numbers are huge, and they point to a massive failure of the public education system leading up to college.
"On campus, the tests were given in 2003 to a representative sample of 1,827 students at public and private schools. The Pew Charitable Trusts funded the survey.
It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."
My wager is that the public and private school literacy and quantitative skills diverged markedly. Even so, this sort of thing makes me ill. I've tutored the kids these numbers represent. They were my own classmates who could understand the concepts being taught in the classroom, but were completely unmanned when it came to absorbing a professor's lecture and test questions delivered at collegiate level English. They aren't stupid or lazy, just guilty of attending ****ty schools.
"Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
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."
I'd like to have seen stats on those who have graduated as opposed to those just attending college, as I suspect quite a few are just paying colleges for the privilege to attend and not making real progress toward a degree.
"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."
It's tempting to make fun of these people, but these numbers are huge, and they point to a massive failure of the public education system leading up to college.
"On campus, the tests were given in 2003 to a representative sample of 1,827 students at public and private schools. The Pew Charitable Trusts funded the survey.
It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."
My wager is that the public and private school literacy and quantitative skills diverged markedly. Even so, this sort of thing makes me ill. I've tutored the kids these numbers represent. They were my own classmates who could understand the concepts being taught in the classroom, but were completely unmanned when it came to absorbing a professor's lecture and test questions delivered at collegiate level English. They aren't stupid or lazy, just guilty of attending ****ty schools.
Comment