So college costs too much (see my post here), and as a result, it appears that students think they’re paying enough that they don’t have to pay attention.

In December 2005, a report was released indicating declining levels of literacy amongst graduates of four-year colleges and universities.  According to The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, “average prose literacy for all levels of educational attainment between 1992 and 2003. … Average document literacy also decreased among adults who completed education above a covational, trade, or business school.”  The same report showed that only 31% of college graduates had proficient level of prose literacy, and a mere 25% of college graduates could read documents proficiently.  (N.B. Prose is qualified as the tasks needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continues texts (e.g., an essay, a newspaper article, books, etc.)  Document literacy entails the ability do use information from noncontinuous texts in various formats.)

So student’s can’t read.  My (limited) experience with students (undergraduate and graduate) is that many of them can’t write either.  The two are linked.  What’s more disturbing is that not only can students not read, a new report issued yesterday shows that nearly 20% of students who have graduated with a four-year college degree cannot do the math necessary to determine if there’s enough gas in their gas tanks to get them to a specific destination.  Insidehighered.com summarized it best, I think:

The students who can’t calculate whether you have enough gasoline to make it to the next stop have “basic” quantitative skills, the report says. That means, for example, that they could add the price of a sandwich and the price of a salad on a menu.

(Now, the latter study surveyed only 80 randomly selected institutions, and included two- and four-year public and private institutions (there are over 4,100 institutions that meet that criteria (who, btw, enrolled nearly 16,000,000 students in the fall of 2001, according to this site), so the results aren’t entirely generalizable, but they’re still telling.)

So here’s the question: Who’s fault is this?  Shouldn’t students be coming to college with the skills necessary to add a sandwich and drink together to determine if they can get the behemoth three-foot sub and gallon of soda or if they can only get the half-gallon and one-foot sub?  That being said, the high schools can only work with the students they get.  The adolescent years are awkward enough for middle school students, so expecting them to learn a lot can be challenging.  Elementary schools not only have to teach math and reading, but also other basic skills, like respect and self-control.  So who’s responsibility is it to ensure that students can add numbers together, determine whether they have enough gas to get to the bar, and then write an essay about their experiences after the fact?

The government believes that NCLB will solve these maligns in the system.  Unfunded mandates that remove funding from school systems if markers like these don’t increase from year to year.  Mandates are good.  Unfunded ones don’t work well.

I wonder if we should pay our teachers more for the jobs they do.  Educators continue to be an underappreciated profession in this area of the world (I wonder if it’s the same elsewhere as well), and certainly deserve far higher levels of pay than they are currently afforded.

Who’s fault is it?  Everyone’s?  No one’s?  I’m not sure.  But something needs to happen. I’ll retire in 40 years, and today’s students, and their children, will be funding my retirement (assuming that Social Security manages to retain its solvency).  I worry that if they can’t add, my portfolio (which surprisingly did rather well last year) could fall victim to a transposed, mistyped, or poorly written mathematical function.

Who’s failing who?