College Students Lack Basic Life Skills
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse… it usually does. In my whining about the terrible state of K-12 public education, I’ve always had this fantasy that if students could make it to college and finish with a degree, they’d be OK.
Now, this story makes me think that my fantasy is just that… a fantasy. According to a American Institutes for Research study funded by Pew Charities:
- Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies…
While the study found that college students had greater abilities to understand prose, they lacked the skills to understand “quantative literacy”, such as the questions posed above. The study also found little difference based on ethnic groups or measures of poverty. The problem seems to be universal.
It sounds to me like colleges now have yet one more area of remediation to include. My personal feeling is that this lack of skills is as the result of colleges thinking that students already possessed these skills from their K-12 education. Hopefully, K-12 educators will also recognize their responsibility to prepare their students and incorporate these skills into earlier instruction.
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