It’s official. We are a nation of illiterates, with college degrees. “As if this weren’t enough, there are also disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates,” the U. S. Commission on the future of higher education found. “Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined.”
“Unacceptable numbers of college graduates enter the workforce without the skills employers say they need in an economy where, as the truism holds correctly, knowledge matters more than ever.” The commission members, who serve without pay, were appointed by the U. S. Secretary of Education—Margaret Spellings. On August 10th, they approved for submission to the Secretary their report with its gloomy findings on college literacy.
“According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates of all ages deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade,” the commission reported. “These shortcomings have real-world consequences.”
“Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces.”
So what did the commission recommend? “The federal government, states and institutions should significantly increase need-based student aid.” And how did the business leaders on the committee react to that finding? They promised to support it.
None mentioned the trendlines on student aid that already show that this subsidy is zooming off the charts while colleges and universities jack up fees and spending every year. In other words, the commission meeting looked much like board of trustees meetings on most college campuses.
“We do better by the best but not by the rest,” Trinity University’s Arturo Madrid observes. “We are privileging the privileged.” Dr. Madrid is a Murchison Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at Trinity.
In a commission dominated by academics and their allies, economist Richard Vedder stood out at the unveiling of the report at the Department of Education by bringing up salient issues that other members would not address. For example, he noted that two-thirds of college spending is already paid for by public funding.
“For me it was a tough decision to vote for this report,” Dr. Vedder said at the meeting at the DOE. Specifically, he criticized the deletion of any reference to “the $80 billion student loan industry omitted due to protests to the chair [Charles Miller].” For the record, the chair did not respond nor did any of Dr. Vedder’s fellow commissioners.
Dr. Vedder is a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio State University. He went on to criticize other “errors of omission” in the report including the lack of references to:
• “The deplorable lack of intellectual diversity” on college campuses.
• “Hedonism on campus.”
• “Members of Congress who politically interfere in research allocations.”
Still, Dr. Vedder, who is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, does note that “the report calls for more transparency in college and university administration and that could be a transcendent change.” Yet, in the end, could there be a link between the lack of intellectual diversity that only Dr. Vedder of the 19 commission members would discuss and the illiteracy that the advisory panel could not ignore?
If you focus your classroom activities on indoctrination, how much time is left over for the imparting of basic skills?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
