January 20th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
An AP report on CBS News summarizes a literacy study of college students:
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.That means they could not 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.
Sad. I figured master’s degrees would be required for my kids in the future, but not because bachelor’s degrees would be worth diddly squat.
The wrong way to fix it:
“This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don’t do it,” Finney said. “States have no idea about the knowledge and skills of their college graduates.”
Monitoring this as a nation? With some government agency that will throw money at this problem? Please, no.
The answer to this is less subsidy, not more. Consumers still pick colleges. Let the state colleges raise their rates and publish literacy rates to contest for bodies. Employers can use the literacy data among the other data they collect now to weigh the worth of one college’s degrees over another, and they can donate to or subsidize those colleges that perform better. Colleges can cut their cost by requiring literacy prior to admission, thus saving the college money in hiring remedial teachers.
We can blame the high schools, sure, but that’s a natural consequence of funding disconnected from results.
January 22nd, 2006 at 8:48 am
Dan, I like this post and agree with your solution. I recently talked to one of my math buddies who teaches at Wichita State Uni. He was complaining about a class he has to teach to ‘circumvent’ college algebra for math education majors. He was appalled that a lot of his ‘math teacher’ students couldn’t factor the difference of squares, let alone name it appropriately [i.e., (x^2-y^2) = (x-y)(x+y)].
Dr. Paulos, in his book ‘Innumeracy’, describes the nation as a whole with this problem. I can see it in my lab: engineers who don’t want to think outside of their box, ‘Oh, that’s a math or physics problem - i don’t know how to do that.’ Or worse from non-engineers: the lack of knowledge of some basic fractions, percentages and college algebra by those who claim ‘experience’ as their champion.
Finally, I am just not impressed by the education system in Kansas. I got schooled in Colorado schools and even as a non-traditional student I know more than those young Kansas students. I’m not an ed major just a math major.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart.