BS in BS?

Boy stuff like this does make you wonder. The American Institutes for Research released a report that says that college students are graduating with only basic performance levels on a number of crucial skills. The study measured three different kinds of literacy.

1. Prose literacy - the knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts. (e.g., editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials., document literacy, and quantitative literacy)
2. Document literacy - The knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from noncontinuous texts in various formats. (e.g., job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and drug or food labels)
3. Quantitative literacy - The knowledge and skills required to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials. (e.g., balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order form, or determining the amount of interest on a loan from an advertisement)

Here are some highlights from the press release:

- Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy (as opposed to with prose or document literacy): approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have only Basic quantitative literacy. Basic skills are those necessary to compare ticket prices or calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad from a menu.

- There are no significant differences in the literacy of students graduating from public and private institutions.

- Literacy level is significantly higher among students who say their coursework places a strong emphasis on applying theories or concepts to practical problems, in comparison to students who say their coursework rarely touch on these skills.

There's a lot in the report. Something that pops out to me at first blush is that it seems there may not be a very strong effect of college education on basic skills, or at least not as measured by performance in the types of literacy assessed. This is a very casual and loose conclusion. It is based on what I see as a repeated pattern of results: student groups that have characteristics associated with underserved backgrounds tended to show lower scores than students from groups associated with higher levels of socio-economic privilege.
For example:
Students in 4-year colleges with the highest levels of personal or family income had higher prose and document literacy than students with the lowest levels of personal or family income. Differences based on financial dependence were not significant between students.

The study did find that students enrolled in colleges (2 or 4 year) had better overall performance than adults who had not attended college. This was in the AP reports, as if we should all breathe a sigh of relief and think "at least there's some benefit". This does not change my initial impressions though, as I think it's just reflective of how colleges are set up these days, those who go to school (and especially to a 4 year school) go because they can. They can go because they are the kids who have privilege over their peers. Higher income areas and better safer school systems tend to go together. The apparent beneficial "effect" of post secondary education might just as easily be the result of the actual effect of that privileged background on those kids. That is, what they got pre-college.

Further, "The average literacy of U.S. college students was generally the same regardless of how long students had been in college, their enrollment status, or the number of postsecondary institutions they attended." So what is the effect of the college education? If there were one, shouldn't there be a significant positive correlation between skill and years in college, or higher scores for people in college vs people who dropped out 5 years ago? This seems to be missing.

It's a little creepy.

I know this is cruel and cynnical, but regarding the overall finding of lower than expected levels of quantitative literacy across college students, I have to wonder what would happen if the assessment had asked the kids to calculate which bar had the best beer special on Thursday night.