Many college students can no longer read assigned texts, reports Campus Reform:
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.” ….
“I [am] having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”…
Timothy O’Malley, who teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame, told Fortune that he can no longer assign 25 to 40 pages of reading because his students would not “know what to do.”
“They’ve been formed in a kind of scanning approach to reading,” O’Malley explained, adding that students often rely on artificial intelligence to understand texts…
A recent Elon University survey found college students rely too much on artificial intelligence to do their assignments.
Students enter college unable to write competently. Many graduate still unable to write. High school grades have risen even as test scores have fallen and students’ knowledge has shrunk, especially in math. American IQs appear to be falling as the educational system fails to teach skills or stimulate minds.
College students are learning less and less. People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg noted, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than in the past, and their average amount of education in years has grown. These trends are illustrated on his graph, “WordSum Scores Overtime.”
Going to college no longer expands people’s vocabularies the way it once did: Since 1970, there has been a steady decline in the correlation between years of education and people’s personal word stock.
Even back in 2011, when students learned more than they do today, nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates learned almost nothing in their first two years in college, according to a study by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation. Although federal higher-education spending had mushroomed in the preceding years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.” The National Assessment of Adult Literacy also showed that degree holders are learning less.
