The Average College Student Is Illiterate

Though there seems to have been some editing and a change in title, the article was posted yesterday here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966

Original article: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-colleg...

This is a duplicate of the article posted yesterday and discussed here. It's on a different site and has a different URL but the content is identical.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966

This is far deeper a crisis than I get the impression is being understood by these comments. This is a serious economic issue for each and every business going forward, because they are the future employee pool.

I've been working in software development for 40+ years, where I was lucky to work on multiple high profile projects. The last 25 years I've worked with a lot of recent graduates at both undergrad and graduate levels, due to consulting for their startups and places they work. I've been considering it a covid cognitive impact, but my one person's experience I know is unreliable. I have found basic indirection is an issue with recent graduates, as in "pointers are hard", which on first exposure sure, but years later? More than one level of indirection, and they have to stop and reason it out. I've never considered memory management difficult, and the push for "memory safety" to be more about selling software than actual "safety"; but for recent graduates they are afraid of handling their own memory, and could not if they tried; too many levels of logical indirection active at once. Working with soon to graduate software interns, their reliance on AI is dangerous - they don't know their fundamentals, and are masking that lack of understanding so they'll never really know.

The real issue is a lack of cognitive flow: asking for a description of their work, their reply does not logically flow. It jumps around, meanders, maybe answers the question, maybe not. After a while they just stop talking like they ran out of words.

I'm not saying this to be a "me too, get off my lawn" comment. This is a serious, nation in crisis level issue. It part of why our politics is so haywire: it's not just recent graduates, our educational system has been manufacturing people like this for about two decades.

This has been posted twice now in HN and seems to have attracted a lot of attention. But this seems to be the type of essay that just confirms HN’s pre-existing beliefs but has no real data around it.

I can absolutely see professors from when I went to college saying the exact same things except with laptops, Facebook, google etc. I’m not saying that there are no issues with higher education today, but I don’t think this is a good way of understanding them.

I'm completely in agreement that addiction to phones, addiction to gambling, a reduction in the degree to which the muscles of writing and the muscles of reading are exercised, and a reduced ability to concentrate on difficult intellectual efforts is a growing problem in our society.

However, the author might not guess that those same students, the ones who are barely literate, are somehow still powering our society through a rise in economic productivity greater than ever before.

Consider the steely-eyed missile men who sent Apollo to the moon, the Greatest Generation that defeated fascism and brought about so many revolutionary technologies through WWII, the inventors behind the first industrial revolutions, the explorers who circled the globe in the Age of Exploration, the literal Renaissance Men of DaVinci and Newton and Kepler and Copernicus: For all their educational and cognitive prowess, their societies were somehow less capable than ours.

I would posit that our tools are just that much better in spite of reduced average literacy. Just as we programmers state "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away", so our brains' processing centers are burdened with the malware of ad-tech and addiction, and our storage is clogged with video entertainment. But if you've got to recall 100 obscure factoids, the average 6th grader in 2025 with access to Siri and Google will beat Einstein with a card catalog, and then return to rotting their brain with TikTok.

I don't know what this means for the future. But "The average college student is illiterate" follows with the unstated subtext "and this is going to be a disaster when they need that education to do stuff in the future" and I don't think that's accurate.

None of this is all or nothing. The school could offer catch-up classes. The school and the professor could test and refuse registration in a class for students that are missing the prerequisites. Which means they would need to test at the beginning of the class - and extra work. The school could offer a mechanism for doing that without letting the students stranded with no classes they can register into. etc, etc.

But yeah, of course it's absurd to expect one professor to run this on their own when it's really a school-level issue.

I consult in higher ed and I feel like some of what is said is true while many other parts are not. First let me say that my impression is that current college students do tend to have shorter attention spans and a weak grasp on plagiarism.

I was going to write a long response comparing the actual reading levels of Poisonwood and Harry Potter, the potential mismatch in subject interest that teens might have when tasked to read "social commentary" books or even the absurd notion of using Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to talk about Communism when likely everyone would have enjoyed Animal Farm but I'll just addressing this final lament from the author.

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

This perfectly highlights both the deflection as well and the fundamental lack of understanding. If you offer a crappy product, don't be surprised when people either don't purchase it or in the cases where they are forced to purchase it don't engage. Of course it is the fault of the faculty and no, you're not doing the best you can with what you have been given. You are doing what you want to do, in the way you have always wanted to do it and you are lamenting that your current customers are no longer interested in what you are selling. That is not meeting you customer where they are.

Imagine if this was a car company who stuck to the idea that station wagons were what we always produced and if the current generation of car buyers want a sedan or an ebike well then they are just wrong.