Universities admit students who are 'almost illiterate', lecturers warn
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
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.
In my MSc in Computer Science in the UK we had 9 international(Chinese) students.
8 of them dropped out after 3 months - they could barely speak English, they definitely could not write in English, and the reason why they dropped out was because for 3 months they used our lab as a place to play League of Legends, and nothing else.
To be accepted, they all must have already obtained a BSc degree in Computer Science or related field from somewhere, and have at least 7 on an IELTS exam to demonstrate their English proficiency. I honestly don't see how either one was possible.
That has nothing to do with being called a man instead of a sir. They literally couldn't speak the language of the course they got accepted into.
I am tempted to say that it's the fault of the university for accepting them in the first place, but in a way, their hands are tied in how much vetting they can do, and things like IELTS are meant to be completely objective.
None (that I know of) made it out of the program. I have no clue how they ever got in the door, as this was a international top 100 program. I actually finished the semester by skipping the discussion section altogether, doing the readings in my own time, and going straight to the professor's office hours with my notes and questions. He understood completely. I think he actuall envied me my freedom.
On the flip side, my partner (whom I met in college) was a refugee with poor English her freshman year. Yet she graduated -- with honors -- in a shade over three years, with two degrees in the soft sciences and better written and spoken English than myself. Then she got a degree in a hard science. Then a masters.
And that's the problem with anecdotes. I could choose either to be representative of my experience, but I'd be wrong either way. Without some quantitative data, we really can't know if this is a real phenomenon or not.
I guess this is even worse over here since many classes are not available in english.
That's just my perception, though. I have no data to back any of this up, so take it with a grain of salt.
They know basic english (because they have english class at school and indeed because of internet), there are more and more "almost bilingual" people, but to say that most of them are proficient (not even almost bilingual, just advanced comprehension) in english is absurd.
At least in France and the asian countries I've visited. Some european countries like Iceland or Norway speak much better english. but I doubt it's because of the internet. I think they just have a better education system in certain areas.
My wife is a lecturer in an English department at a Russell Group university, and whilst some percentage of her students are extremely critical she has had a very hard time getting them to have a basic comprehension of critical English. By this I mean, the students cannot define the words that they use, and do not understand the language that they consume and create.
Their vocabulary appears to be smaller, and the phrasing is reflective of people who are reading fewer long-reads, fewer critical pieces and papers.
She spends too much of her own allocated teaching time raising the standard such that she is able to work with them on more complex analytical thought towards the end of the degree.
The chances that the students may read Adorno in their spare time approaches zero, and so the chances of them comprehending Deleuze does not exist.
If that sounds lofty, bear in mind that the students that she has comprise a decent proportion of foreign students who cannot even pass basic English comprehension tests, and yet are admitted because the fees for them are so high that the university will accept them no matter what.
If you use the more restrictive "age 15 and over has completed five or more years of schooling" the UK has a literacy rate of 99%. That's not a useful definition, in part because the UK has laws forcing children into education until age 18, and partly because it tells you nothing about outcomes.
http://www.indexmundi.com/united_kingdom/literacy.html
If you use other definitions, such as that for "funtionally illiterate" you start finding many more people that meet the definition.
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/adult_literacy/illiterate_ad...
> More common is the use of the term "functionally literate". Around 16 per cent, or 5.2 million adults in England, can be described as "functionally illiterate". They would not pass an English GCSE and have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old. They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems
> Many areas of employment would not be open to them with this level of literacy and they may also struggle to support their children with reading and homework, or perform other everyday tasks.
That's not "at the level expected of a smart 11 year old", but the average 11 year old.
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.
I am prepared to accept that I'm wrong on this one. Perhaps I've been giving all the kids in my community too much credit, or maybe I live in a community of outliers. Whatever the case, their ability to converse with me in conceptual English is still impressive, and the schools here are shit.
Her kids can talk just fine, well sort of, there are a lot of SpEd kids and non-English speakers in those 40 kid classes. But the 'median' kids talk without issues. It's mostly limited to reading and writing. As for maths? Fuggeddaboutit. The mean SAT score was a 325 in math, and that's when you take out the kids that started fights during the SAT.
I have come to the conclusion that not everyone is fit for higher education, unless we lower the bar.
Or unless we improve education at earlier stages, which hardly seems impossible.
But of course, that won't look good on the bottom line, so in they come.
It's 'pidgin English,' not 'pigeon'.
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...
(If someone can spot an error I've made, this can go on forever. Wheee!) ;-)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I suspect this test is the single biggest reason for the success of the company.
I suspect any reasonable test in that general direction would do the job. I don't think they use it to specifically hire the people who achieve the very best scores, but rather to not hire the ones who perform poorly.
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand though. Or are you saying that colleges have zero influence on their students' education, and the only thing that determines if a student fails or succeeds is whether they really met the course requirements at enrollment time?
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.