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Universities admit students who are 'almost illiterate', lecturers warn
- Joof 10y agoI'd love to see some data behind this. It's too easy to view this incorrectly from the point of view of an educator.
- slmkbh 10y agoTo be fair, this is also a concern here in Denmark. Quite a few University professors have complained that students do not have adequate skills in mathematics, as the bar has been lowered over a number of years in the high school system. My opinion is, the wish for a higher percentage of university graduates in a generation has lead to an inappropriate lowering of standards. (even if I am part of it....)
- ktamiola 10y agoNatural sciences are a disaster nowadays. I also see this trend whilst talking to people interested working for my startup.
- ktamiola 10y agoIf you start searching, you will find the data. There is a decent body of work on the attention span issues and cognitive abilities. The most of it in the context of "social media" revolution. It's not my area of expertise, though. My personal experience at Cambridge and Groningen University was always very good with students. Yet, these are peculiar places.
- ouid 10y agoAmong its statistics, the article presents that "60 percent of lecturers have caught some student cheating". This is so unusable and misleading that I'm tempted to call the whole article bogus.
- bencollier49 10y agoI think the statistic to look for (where?) would be the percentage of students caught cheating who are not subsequently expelled. My guess is that this figure has risen, as a result of the profit motive.
- closeparen 10y agoIn the US, about 40% of students who enter college do not graduate [0]. This has many surprising implications. - Graduating from college, any college, does mean something because many of the people who try can't hack it. - Big state schools seem to be "of the people" while elite private schools are, well, elite. But they are not so different. Elite private schools have low admission rates but also near-zero dropout rates. Big public schools have high admission rates but also dropout rates in the 40-60% range. They just apply their filters at different parts of the funnel. - The way to a more educated population is probably not to expand college access. Already, far more people access college than can complete it. More interesting questions are about how we best serve the people at risk of dropping out. The answer might be to make state schools more selective, not less, so that we aren't wasting people's time (and money!) with programs they'll never complete. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
- emondi 10y agoYou can still learn a lot even if you don't graduate.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoSure, but the possession of a real university degree pretty much guarantees you can at least read, write & reason. Most Americans without a University degree can read, write & reason, of course, often better than a University grad, but the University degree proves you can do it at least minimally. It used to be that a grade 8 certificate would provide that guarantee, then it used to be that a grade 12 certificate would do it too. There are far cheaper ways of proving somebody can read, write & reason but for some reason employers seem to be stuck on that University diploma. I guess it's easy for them.
- Melchizedek 10y agoAt the company where I work there is a written test of language/logic/math that applicants for jobs have to take. This has had the effect that almost nobody at this company is stupid or incompetent. They are also easy to work with - I would guess partly because social ability is correlated to intelligence. I suspect this test is the single biggest reason for the success of the company.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoThe most interesting point in the article is the plan to shift university ratings away from research and towards student satisfaction. I can't see how they can do that without taking away responsibility for grading.
- tajen 10y agoDo we still have grading in university? Since we started removing marks in middle school, should we keep going in adulthood by keeping students away from being evaluated? so universities don't have to make students unhappy.
- lunchladydoris 10y agoPerhaps universities have overlooked a simple solution to illiterate students: don't admit them! But of course, that won't look good on the bottom line, so in they come.
- zakk 10y agoThe same headlines in Italy, last time a couple of weeks ago. And still the European Union calls for a higher percentage of university students. I have come to the conclusion that not everyone is fit for higher education, unless we lower the bar.
- CalRobert 10y agoI've come to the conclusion that much of "higher" education isn't. More a mediocre patch on nearly nonexistent secondary school.
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- gmac 10y agounless we lower the bar Or unless we improve education at earlier stages, which hardly seems impossible.
- monodeldiablo 10y agoThis smells a lot like anecdata. "Almost illiterate", in the age of the Web? I smell bullshit.* Something tells me that this is more a reflection of the rapidly changing state of our language -- and the mounting generation gap therein -- than some sort of universal dumbing down. The Boomers' parents had a similar reaction to all the groovy new lingo and loosening linguistic conventions. When they said "illiterate", they really meant "nearly unintelligible to me", or had a negative reaction to being called "man" instead of "sir". The definitions of literacy are changing. They're always changing. Without a quantitative measure to back up the claims, I'm inclined to think this is just reactionary garbage masquerading as fact. * I'd absolutely believe that critical thinking skills are on the decline, however. I blame the balkanization/insularity of internet communities and the industrial commodification of higher education. Teaching critical thinking requires individual attention that is increasingly scarce in the rush to get everybody "educated". Simultaneously, the web has allowed and encouraged people to choose increasingly niche communities in which to spend their time, reducing their contact with different or challenging ideas, cultures, and experiences.
- Balgair 10y agoIlliteracy is hard to really pin down, as other commenters say. I'll provide another anecdata point too: Wife is a public HS teacher. Many of her native English speaking kids are illiterate yet use their phones like they were air to breathe. This may seem contradictory, but it hinges on the definition of illiteracy. They can read a word, yes, even type them out with a speed unmatched by anyone over 25, but they do not type more than 7 words at a time (again anecdata). That 7 word number is about the same as your working memory limit, and there seems to be a causation there, though it may be correlation. The kids just cannot read a sentence of any real length, like many of the ones posted on HN. Imagine trying to read Aztec Hieroglyphs. You have to decipher each word from the drawings on a stone fresco and it is not easy work to do this. By the time you reach the end of a line of these strange drawings, you have forgotten what the first word was. That is how the kids see reading, they try to decipher the word, and then about halfway through the sentence they have forgotten the first word. The meaning of the article is totally lost in the exertion of translating the symbols. That is how many of her kids are illiterate in the age of the Web.
- teknologist 10y agoWhile living in China I've met several postgrads who studied in the UK or US but speak only pidgin English at best. How did they get through it? With money and copious amounts of cheating, probably.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoWhile criticizing someone else's English it's almost guaranteed you'll make an error of your own. It's 'pidgin English', not 'pigeon'.
- aaronbrethorst 10y agoI upvoted you, but the comma after 'pidgin English' should really go inside the quote. i.e. It's 'pidgin English,' not 'pigeon'. :) http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around-quotation-marks.html http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...
- nkoren 10y agoThat is correct, but I believe you meant 'e.g.' rather than 'i.e.': http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/ie-versus-eg http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/ie-versus... (If someone can spot an error I've made, this can go on forever. Wheee!) ;-)
- jwilk 10y agoNo, their use of 'i.e.' was correct.
- aninhumer 10y agoThat's a style choice, and one that's largely rejected by this audience because we're used to logically nested programming languages.
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago
- DanBC 10y agoA big part of the problem here is over-emphasis on academic degrees, and under-appreciation of the value of vocational qualifications. This pushes people into degree courses because that's the only way they can get into the job they want to do, even if that degree education isn't necessarily the best way for them to gain skills and knowledge needed. > Another senior lecturer in nursing at a university in northern England, said: “We can now see a whole generation of registered nurses who cannot read critically or write coherently but who have somehow passed a degree – this is worrying”. There's surely a role for both here - the academic nursing degree for nurses who want to move into management or nurse-practictioner or nurse-prescriber or other specialised nursing roles (intensive care; eating disorder), and a vocational degree for nurses who just want to nurse.
- tremon 10y agoA big part of the problem here is over-emphasis on academic degrees, and under-appreciation of the value of vocational qualifications I disagree. I think that universities should focus on academic degrees, and leave the vocational training to other shools and/or businesses. You even say so in the rest of your post: the problem is that businesses tend to overvalue academic titles and undervalue vocational titles, which leads to people pursuing academic titles even though they have no use for them.
- enord 10y agoThis is probably a result of New Public Management (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_public_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_public_management) in education governance. When the pupil is modeled as a "customer" something has to take the place of "revenue" when measuring the relative success of different management- and educational strategies and comparing them to cost. There are different quantifiable "revenues" in education like student-hours, grade averages, diplomas etc. But the focus is on diplomas, passing grades and standardized tests (as opposed to teaching hours or other measures of undefinable value to the "customer"). To cover cost, teaching institutions rely on funding, and funding is tied to "revenue" e.g. test-results and diplomas. This causes a misalignment of incentives that reveals the real customer of teaching institutions: The funding agencies (department of education, local state government etc.). Students, or more specifically diplomas, are the product. And demand is growing. The only rational response is to produce more diplomas and test results. The supply of students who will thrive in a given educational environment, now defined implicitly as "that which produces the desired diplomas and test results" is fixed. Lower standards or lose funding. The NPM-ethos is "run it like a business" so the choice is obvious.
- Main_ 10y agoI actually had the opposite experience. Whereby, I as a non-native english speaker was surprised at the level of english of born and bred english speakers. It was disastrous at times. Most did not go over a single sentence without using auto-correct or other tools. I've seen some copy text from the internet and put it through an article spinner, then paste it to their assignments. Not just because of laziness or the desire to cheat, but because they couldn't spell or form appropriate sentences.
- Main_ 10y agoAdditionally, just because your english isn't so good doesn't mean you don't know the subject you are writing about. Unless your thesis is about English Literature, then I agree with the article. I had a colleague who could barely write anything, but he was so outstanding in Math, that the professor asked him politely not to attend the classes anymore. His thesis was impossible to read but he still got the best marks. Your intelligence and abilities to understand and master a subject have nothing to do with how well you write/speak. It is however crucial to learn to write and speak properly in the longterm, especially if you decide to work/live in that country.
- tnzn 10y agoThere's still a strong myth that there is a causal effect between how well you can write, and how well you can think, conduct a logical reasoning or w/e... And of course most people who say that believe to know better than linguists/psychology researchers on the matter.
- vorotato 10y agoWell they can't go back to highschool, and clearly even if they did they wouldn't get a better education. What do you recommend they do? They are willing to take out loans to learn, we should have classes which handle less educated students.