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Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an article on the new report from the Education Department “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” which makes some alarming claims:

Not only does it find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

“This seems like another piece of hard evidence, a fairly clear indication, that the ‘value added’ that higher education gave to students didn’t improve, and maybe declined, over this period,” said Charles Miller, the former University of Texas regent who is heading the U.S. education secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. “You have the possibility of people going through schools, getting a piece of paper for sitting in class a certain amount, and we don’t know whether they’re getting what they need. This is a fair sign that there are some problems here.”

There are, of course, also always problems with these sorts of reports, and these sorts of statistics. I also hope that Charles Miller is not assuming that a change in student outcomes rests solely on the actions of educational institutions, and college-level ones at that. I have not yet read the full report, which can be downloaded as a PDF here, but I have seen many similar reports, as we all have.

Anyone who has ever been forced to sit through one of Jay Leno’s lame routines, where he asks American college students wandering the streets of Hollywood to identify the current President and Vice President, or to find Germany or Hawai’i on a map, and heard their so amusing, so very silly answers, knows Something Is Terribly Wrong Here. To watch Jay Leno, you might believe that “75% of college graduates are not proficient from a literacy standpoint.” Can things really be that bad? Are 69% of graduate students also lacking proficiency in everyday literacy? Am I, to put things another way, completely surrounded by the 31% of grad students who are equipped to survive, literacy-wise? One explanation for the shockingly low numbers is that researchers classified people into three groups: basic, intermediate, and proficient. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

While I am skeptical about these numbers, I am ready to agree that the education system is not doing enough for students. I do think it is a bit silly to talk about the failures of higher education in this area as if students’ abilities, skills, backgrounds, and most especially their preparation at earlier levels of education were not also factors in the literacy levels they reached at the college age. As the Inside Higher Ed article notes, this point was not lost on the researchers who “agreed there was significantly more work to be done to determine whether (a) colleges are taking students who have been significantly underprepared by their previous schools, (b) the colleges are failing to catch those students up, or both.”

You don’t need a fancy study. Ask College students what they have trouble doing. Ask what skills and tasks are new to them, or rarely asked of them. Ask them what tasks are. What’s missing?

And how do we get more students–at every level–into the “proficiency” (i.e. winners’) circle? Reading Across the Curriculum is not a term you hear bandied about as much, say, as WAC, or CAC, or WID. But it is an integral part of this work. The study identifies different types of literacy: prose literacy (reading the Times or understanding a brochure), document literacy (interpreting a chart or graph), and quantitative literacy (dealing with numbers: checkbooks, percentages). One thing I actually appreciate about the CUNY Proficiency Exam (and I don’t, as a rule, go around appreciating high-stakes tests) is that the second part requires a combination of the latter two forms of literacy. But do we require these of students, outside of the testing scenario, often enough? The article also cites a study at Illinois State which “found that honors students were assigned an average of fewer than 50 pages of reading a week, and that two of five students acknowledged completing less than half of that work.” What exactly do we do about the students who don’t (carefully) read what’s assigned?