College Students Lack Literacy 687
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that "more than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Patience (Score:2, Informative)
God Bless College Life
Re:Too True (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yay diversity! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:2, Informative)
Hey. I know it's a joke, but the US has lots of tough colleges. The quality of secondary education may be bad, overall, but the US have some of the best colleges in the world. My university [calpoly.edu] is one of the best public schools in the country, and its computer science department is well known. You should also remember universities such as Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech (among others), who will also give you an academic butt-whipping (at least in the engineering and science disciplines).
Re:Helicopter parents... (Score:5, Informative)
They were original used for motor homes, so that in case of an accident, rescuers knew to look for a baby. Things got a little out of hand afterwards, though.
Link in sig: (Score:1, Informative)
If you really are concerned about the harm done by the banking system, drop the anti-semetism.
It has not been relevant to discussions of banking since the 1600's. Even then it was the pope's fault that all the western-european bankers were jewish. It was illegal for any christian to engage in money lending for interest, and jewish people in western europe were barred from most other professions.
Since the invention of the corporation, most banks have been owned by shareholders of all religions.
Grammar Nazi Strikes Again (Score:2, Informative)
The past participle of "to go" is "gone" rather than "went". The simple past tense and the past participle are the same in regular verbs, so mistakes with irregular verbs are inderstandable. Nevertheless, you should be using the past participle with the helper "have" for the conventional present perfect.
Re:Complex? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who needs math? There are calculators (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. It's called my cellphone.
Give me a break! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Fewer books (Score:1, Informative)
Surprising, and yet nothing new (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Tipping 101 for the common fool, by a common fo (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe I lack numeric literacy (numeracy?), but shouldn't 13.7 + 7 be 20.7, not 19.7? You just shorted your server a buck...
Re:How? (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds complicated when you describe it like this, doesn't it? You probably learned it at such a young age that you don't remember a time when it didn't make sense or you had to think about it.
Another sign of this is a somewhat new breakdown in the clothing and fashion industry. It used to be that there were just Fashion Designers, who controlled the making of a garment from mental conception all the way to the fractions of an inch, stitches per inch, seam width, etc., that were given to the manufacturers of garments. Nowadays, there are Fashion Designers, and Tech Designers. The Fashion Designer has the "creative" part, and the Tech designer is the one who translates that into inches, stitches, fabrics and so forth! In other words, the ability to handle numbers, fractions, and measurements is now considered difficult enough to render a new job position. I know this because my mother has been in the garmento industry for 40+ years. She is now a tech designer, because nobody wants to do that icky math stuff; all the FIT graduates want to be "creative" designers. Not suprisingly, tech designers typically get paid about 2 to 3 times more than fashion designers.
Re:Why would you carry a credit card balance? (Score:2, Informative)
Your FICO score (http://www.fairisaac.com/ [fairisaac.com]) is determined by 3 factors:
1) the length of your credit history
2) how many of your payments are on time or late
3) the ratio of how much debt/credit you have
Only paying part of your balance will hurt #3. It will not help you in any way.
frontline (Score:1, Informative)
Re: Patience (Score:2, Informative)
Not if the author wanted them to be difficult to understand.
If you come across forms / agreements that are difficult to understand, consider asking for one in plain english [plainenglish.co.uk].