Courtesy of HNN, I read this article by William O’Neill, which reports that the percentage of American graduates proficient in prose literacy has fallen by around 25%. “Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much,” O’Neill reports. “Further, the graduates tested in 1992 were themselves not particularly literate for the declining performance of college students probably dates from somewhere around 1980. Had there been an NAAL in 1970, at a guess, a solid majority of graduates would have been proficient in both prose and document literacy.”
Let us all be horrified with the awfulness of modern universities. “So we have the modern public university on the undergraduate level, where grade inflation is rampant, student skills diminish with every passing year, what passes as teaching is conducted by exploited adjuncts and faculty members who no longer care about standards—for students, that is, the drive for ever-more qualified professors continues unabated. It is a central irony of our situation that while mediocrity among undergraduates is tolerated and even encouraged, the professoriat demands excellence of its members, and of graduate students too as they are potential members.”
Ok, as a university lecturer I have a vested interest in rejecting this characterisation, even if I’m not directly implicated in the US case. But, whatever: let me raise the possibility that the problem might be not that graduates have a problem with literacy, but that Mr. O’Neill has a problem with numeracy.
In 1990, 20.3% of the US population’s 259 million people, or around 52.2 million people were graduates. In 2000, 24.4% of 291 million people – that is, 71 million – were graduates. (Sources: here and here) If the same proportion of the population were graduates in 2000 that had been in 1990, 20.3%, that would have meant that around 59 million were graduates rather than 71 million.
In short, the graduate population rose by about twenty million in the 1990s, fifty percent of which can be put down to the increased size of the population, and fifty percent due to an expanded graduate sector. Graduate numbers have therefore grown by substantially more than the graduate literacy rate has fallen. Right now there are around 14 million people undergoing higher education in the United States, a higher proportion than any other society in the world.
Fairly obviously, an increase in the intake will produce lower quality results. Partly this is because the standard of education will be poorer: clearly, you can teach ten people something more effectively than a hundred. But also it’s just a logical product of the supply of students: you’re naturally going to be accepting students of lower educational attainment if you want to raise the number of people attending. That’s why even the most ill-educated high school principal will focus on “value added” by teachers rather than overall attainment levels when it comes to assessing how well they’re doing. If these numbers are right – that the literacy rate among graduates has fallen at a notably lower rate than graduate numbers have risen – it suggests that the universities are having a net positive effect on literacy.
Examining only the cohort of university students is a classic fallacy. It implies that the cohort is identical in 1990 and 2000. What’s more meaningful is the overall literacy rate in the US. And if we go to the very data that Mr. O’Neill cited to highlight the falling standards of university education – the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) report - we see that the average literacy score for adults in the United States declined by at most a fraction of a percent in the 1990s. For Mr. O’Neill’s vision of falling standards to be accurate, that would mean that the drop in graduate standards would have had to be entirely made up by an equivalent rise in the literacy standards of non-graduates. Either he’s talking nonsense, or self-learners are doing a really fantastic job!
Grade inflation is real. Mass teaching is real. Underfunding is real. We’re no longer in a world where five percent of the population can be groomed for leadership and the rest ignored. But let’s not perpetuate the myth that faculty are failing to provide students a decent education as the modern university sector transforms. Most faculty I know work themselves raw to deliver exactly this kind of service. Most are doing a fantastic job teaching more and more people every year, and they should be praised for it.
Think Of the Children
54 minutes ago
