The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.
The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills.
Reason? Well, here's one that seems rather bizarre to me:
Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet."We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.
Perhaps...but isn't the process of gaining a college degree meant to offset this? Isn't Whitehurst suggesting here that what college students do in their spare time is more predictive of their literacy than what they do in the classroom? If people who surf the web and watch TV a lot have low literacy rates regardless of whether they have a college degree, then...something's wrong with a college education these days.
The entire report is here. Subjects included only those who spoke English or Spanish. For a 2-year degree, 24% have basic or below basic skills in reading prose; for high-school graduates, 52% fall into these lower two categories. Not impressive.
And the fact that there are small but non-zero percentages of people with graduate experience or degrees that fall into the below-basic literacy categories, which according to this rubric means that they would not be capable of "using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time," is just bizarre.
Posted by kswygert at December 16, 2005 01:28 PM