Raakhee Sharma, a freshman government and politics major, has worked at FunFit Family Fitness Center for two years. On a typical day, she would drive to the location of the party using a map, calculate how much gas she had used in the trip so the company could reimburse her, fill out the official paperwork for the family hosting the party and collect payment at the end. At this point, Sharma is more literate than the many graduating college seniors.
Many college students don’t have basic real world skills such as using a map or calculating a tip, according to a study released Jan. 19 by the American Institutes for Research.
The study tested almost 2,000 college students in their last semester nationwide. Participants were asked questions to test real-life skills, such as calculating a tax, understanding a job application or understanding the point of a newspaper article. Almost all participants were able to complete basic tasks such as adding up a total, but relatively few were able to complete the most difficult tasks such as balancing a checkbook.
“If colleges had the assumption that students are prepared to take on college-level work, the results set off an alarm that maybe they aren’t ready for such advanced work,” said Justin Baer, a senior research analyst for AIR
The study measured three kinds of literacy: Prose, which includes reading newspaper articles and pamphlets; document, which includes reading a form, map, or table; and quantitative, which includes calculating a total cost and comparing prices.
The study participants were then placed into one of four categories – below basic, basic, intermediate or proficient – based on their scores.
Students by far scored the lowest in the quantitative section. A staggering 19 percent of students about to graduate from a four-year institution and 29 percent of students about to graduate from a two-year institute scored only in the basic level, which means they are only capable of doing simple math such as adding up the cost of a meal and a drink from a menu, not including tip. That type of math is in a higher level of literacy.
It’s a sight that waiter and junior music education major Ian Stuart has seen often at Hamburger Hamlet in Gaithersburg.
“I have seen people who just can’t think it through, and they’ll just look over at the people they’re with and shrug and have that other person calculate it,” he said.
The study’s results have mixed implications.”Certainly some of the results are disappointing, especially since it isn’t just a survey of college students; it’s students who are about to receive a degree” said Larry McQuillan, communications director for AIR. “We generally think of a degree as a sign of higher education.”
Baer said the study raises many questions about why college students lack such skills and who is to blame, but only further studies can provide answers.
“We would hope that, as part of the K-12 systems, kids would learn how to decode prose and apply basic math,” he said. “Kids should be able to take their skills to the next level,” he added.
Though students are taught complicated skills in grade school, they rarely know how to apply them later in life, he said. A potential way to help students would be to expose them to more reading material or take an additional class in college that would focus on real-world application of basic reading and math.
“We don’t necessarily think of college students needing adult education classes, but they do need to learn these skills,” Baer said. The study also had some positive results. When the authors compared their results to previous studies, including one by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, they found students have improved some of their skills, and actually test better than the average adult.
“Literacy declines over time, which affects the adults,” Baer said. He added while the results seem to suggest college students are becoming more literate than previous generations, only future studies will be able to confirm that.
Contact reporter Megan Eckstein at ecksteindbk@umd.edu.
