One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher-education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.”
I have never actually seen evidence to back up that contention, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your wonderful higher-education system in America.” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.
On Oct. 2, 2006, the Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey, “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of two-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of four-year colleges as “excellent.”
The greatest area of deficiency identified by the business respondents was in communications. About half of new workforce entrants with two-year degrees and more than one-fourth with four-year degrees are rated as “deficient” in their ability to write and understand written material. That finding is not surprising, given the results of last year’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which concluded that literacy among college graduates was shockingly low—and falling.
What makes that so disturbing is that when asked to name the most important skills for new workers to have, business leaders said that those same communication skills were the most important. Nearly 90 percent of the respondents said that those skills were “very important.” (Understanding math was said to be “very important” to 64 percent, science was “very important” to 33 percent, and smaller percentages listed foreign languages, government/economics, history/geography, and humanities/arts.)
Those results underscore an important point. Most jobs don’t call for deep academic background. Employers, for the most part, are looking for people who are readily trainable and can work with others. Good language skills are of the greatest importance in that respect, but many graduates entering the workforce are weak there.
How can it be that people who have gone through their K-12 years and then at least two years of college could be “deficient” in the use of English? A few are children who grew up in households where English wasn’t the main language, but even then you’d expect that they would be at least reasonably proficient in English if they’ve graduated from college. The problem starts early in our educational system.
Reading and writing have been degraded in many schools. Try asking a teacher how much time is spent on diagramming sentences and you’re apt to get a blank stare.
Tests don’t often include essays because grading them takes much more time than running a true-false test through a scanner. Careful reading of books has been replaced to a great extent by videos; papers have been replaced with artsy projects. It’s little wonder that many incoming college students have an aversion to the sort of work that builds reading and writing skills.
Quite a few students do improve their communication skills somewhat in college, but many others coast through on much the same weak foundation they had as freshmen.
Professors often complain that getting their students to read assignments is like pulling teeth. Many of them have thrown in the towel and have adjusted their reading and writing demands downward to keep students happy.
A perfect example of that is found in the book Generation X Goes to College by Peter Sacks, who writes about his “sandbox experiment” to lower academic standards and increase the “fun” quotient in his courses in order to keep his job.
If we want to improve the usefulness of college, the place to start is with English skills.
George C. Leef is vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.