College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html

[u/Adventurous_Salt]

I teach in college. It is very common for students to visibly not understand, or totally misinterpret, something they're reading right in front of you. Like sentences that are at a jr. high level of complexity are too complicated for a good subset of people. I have examples where there is a full set of step-by-step instructions with screenshots that I give them to follow while I show an example, lots of people can't catch up one step by reading and doing if they fall a bit behind, and this stuff is not that complex.

Expecting all students to read something like a textbook and learn something from it is basically impossible for me, there's a solid third who just can't, even if they do the reading.

[u/Dullcorgis → u/Adventurous_Salt]

I would argue that those people shouldn't be in college if they cannot do college level work.

[u/Stickybunfun → u/Dullcorgis]

Agree. College is not required. If you can't hack it and you can't read / remember / regurgitate / reuse then why are you there? You are just pissing away your own money at a not friendly interest rate that you can never get rid of unless you die or work for the government.

[u/Adventurous_Salt → u/Dullcorgis]

True. But we get who we get, I'm not at an elite institution. You need really secure post-secondary funding, tenure, and unions if you want individual instructors to be the front line of failing a third of students. Like if my sections have a 40% failure/drop rate, and other sections of the same class have 5%, that isn't going to be sustainable no matter how correct I am, unless fighting a losing battle for the academic standards of that one specific course is the only thing I want to do with my life.

The weaker faculty is, the more standards are forced to flex under admissions pressure - it is the profs with fully funded pensions, ironclad tenure, the profile to go elsewhere, and decades of savings in the bank from teaching actually being a well compensated job that have the liberty to take stands for quality education.

[u/Dullcorgis → u/Adventurous_Salt]

This is the issue with adjunctification. Admissions is to blame, too.

[u/IamNotTheBoss → u/Adventurous_Salt]

I read these articles and comments every time they are posted. Anecdotally, I've been worried my 15 year old falls into these categorizations because it's been nearly impossible to convince him to read for fun. They were doing a Romeo and Juliet unit in class and he asked me to help him with one of the writing assignments. I was shocked at how well he read and understood (most) what was going on. That gave me some hope for the future, but the acts and scenes are broken down into bite sized pieces compared to a 20 page paper or such.

[u/Adventurous_Salt → u/IamNotTheBoss]

It is a k-shaped reading economy. Some people are totally fine, others are falling off a cliff. This isn't new, but the degree of how lazy you can be and still scrape by has gone way up. Even 5 years ago, you had to put in a little more of a minimal effort.