Only 31 percent of college-educated Americans can fully comprehend something as simple as a newspaper story. Shocking, huh? So you don’t have to be smart to be a college graduate, most aren’t. This was reported in a recent finding of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. The number has shrunk from 10 years ago at which time it was 40 percent. In the Autumn 2006, issue of the Wilson Quarterly, this problem and the U.S.’s global race for knowledge are addressed.

The article states “that most of the jobs now held by college graduates in sales, transportation, services and even the computer industry could be performed successfully by people with little or no higher education.” They go on to say that more than 160 universities offer a Ph.D. in English, a field in which people with doctorates far outnumber the jobs in the field.

What is even worse is that there is an inverse ratio of academic results to the increase in tuition. With the cost of American higher education rising 51 percent after inflation from 1995 to 2005, you would expect some ROI, right? But there is no return on investment. In fact, we are loosing ground and it doesn’t appear that we are about to turn this around anytime soon. Is this education just for the sake of education? Are these institutions of higher learning over-promising and under-delivering?

There are a few reasons why this dismal state of higher education is the way it is. There are two stated in this article and then I add my own observations as a college graduate. The first is that there are no objective measurements of the relative success or failure of a university. From my experience as a corporate executive, the standard was that if you couldn’t measure it, you couldn’t improve it. We were constantly driven to measure everything in business. I even had to measure, not only how many repudiations for legal arguments we prepared daily, but how effective they were in getting denials reversed. So efficiency and efficacy were constantly a factor in measuring success. But at the university level, there are no measures of how successful their academic instruction is. So if we don’t even know where we are in the area of success or failure, then how can anyone expect improvement?




The second reason is that the majority of colleges and universities are public rather than private. What this means is that any threatened campus usually can turn to one or more legislators to save it from destruction. What this does is eliminate accountability being that there are no consequences for failure. This seems to be a common theme that runs through not only the government and politicians as evidenced by recent scandals, but government supported institutions such as those of higher learning.

From my experience as a college graduate, what annoyed me the most was the focus on research and development. You know, the old adage “publish or perish”. When I was in college, the first couple of years was filled with classrooms conducted by graduate students or poorly paid adjuncts. They didn’t really care if I came to class or not, or if I learned or not. I even had a class in which I never attended except for a couple of days which were scheduled for tests. I passed the tests with flying colors without attending even one instruction class. Would you call this quality education? I could have stayed home, saved the thousands of dollars in tuition, and learned right out of a book. Another example of poor instruction, is a 7:00am calculus class taught by a graduate student who did nothing while we put all the previous day’s assignments on the blackboard. If there were any problems that none in the class could solve, the ‘professor’ said, “well when one of you solves it, then put it on the board.” And I paid good money for this!

So, what’s the answer to turn this around? I would say that we have to change the focus of universities from that of research and development to ‘results’ with a focus on excellent instruction with qualified professors and measurable success. What we have been seduced into believing is that we have ‘faith’ in higher learning. But higher learning is not a religion. It is an institution on which we are basing our hopes and dreams of the future in a global competition with high stakes.

Therefore, we need to question that faith and start demanding results that produce graduates who can read, write and think at higher levels in order to solve the problems of the world. As Einstein once said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”. Amen.