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Gone are the days when university freshmen read classical philosophers such as Plato or modern educators such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, college applicants will be lucky if they can read Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grader.
According to the new Adult Skills Survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a forum for 38 high-income, mostly Western countries, a significant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at levels that would be alarming to a high school student in a more functional society.
Survey first published Economisttested approximately 160,000 people of all ages in all 38 Member States. Across all OECD countries, as many as 8 percent of college students were found to read at the level of a ten-year-old child, or worse. While countries such as Germany and France fell below 5 percent, countries such as Poland, Israel and the United States were ahead of the curve with 21, 20 and 14 percent respectively.
The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. In OECD countries, 9 percent of college students study mathematics at the level of a ten-year-old child or below. In Italy, the United States and Slovakia, the figure is above 15 percent, second only to Israel, where approximately 21 percent of college students perform at the same low level.
There appear to be many complex explanations for these test results: pandemic-era learning gaps leading to lower levels of preparation, declining college enrollment forcing schools to lower admissions standards, and lower levels of public education funding, to name a few.
The results also coincide with the explosion of large-scale language models such as ChatGPT, which many believe have created new levels of academic failure in both K-12 and college.
While there is no denying the complexity of this issue, there is evidence that removing technology from classrooms entirely can provide an immediate boost.
For example, in one Minneapolis classroom, a literature and English teacher banned the use of phones and laptops, requiring all class work to be completed on pencil and paper. When the school year began in September, only 46 percent of participating students said they were confident in their reading skills. A few months later, in February, that number was 95 percent.
Although this is just one grade level, something is clearly wrong in the education systems of the world’s richest countries—and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more students will be pushed out into the world with fourth-grader reading skills.
More information about higher education: The company is removing delivery robots from all college campuses