When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.<> The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts. Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.
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First, understand that on the NYT website upon which these sentences were viewed, the column directly to the right of them was filled with advertisements for "career colleges" such as: AIU, University of Phoenix, DeVry, and Grantham University. Herein lies the most glaring issue with this literacy testing data. The suggestion that so many more US citizens are graduating from colleges implies that they are pursuing quality academic experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Career colleges and technology universities are simply businesses operating to produce trained monkey's who attend them solely because the students were never successful in school. Millions of these "graduates" are entering the lush academic fields of HVAC, IT service, fax and copier repair, auto & diesel mechanics, etc. They came from poor quality high schools with mediocre grades hoping to buy into the hype that getting a BA degree from the ever so important sounding University of Phoenix will provide the same level of "wealth" that a BA from UC Berkeley will. All one need do is simply look at their local University of Phoenix or ITT and they will immediately understand that this can never be the case. We are talking strip mall schools here people. With strip mall consumers as students, buying tech training to be "professionals" who will never need to read past the fourth grade but might find some success at the seventh grade reading level.
<>The NYT wants us to believe that college graduates are less literate even though there are more of them. This is true on paper. But the NYT doesn't evaluate or report on the quality of the schools that these graduates attended. Nor does the NYT mention the ever expanding population which really represents the apparent increase in graduates rather than more percent of high school students graduate college. In fact, the actual percent dropped from 23% to 19% of high school graduates who successfully go on to get Bachelor's degrees from fully accredited four year universities across the country.
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