College Students Lacking Literacy Skills

Most College Students Lack Skills:

"More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips."

I know business and government leaders tend to rally around the need for more math/science/tech skills for workforce development, but if college-educated citizens can't understand a newspaper editorial, we've got way bigger problems than competitiveness and productivity.