Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
Friday January 20, 2006 7:02 AM
By BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - More than half of students at four-year colleges - and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges - lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills - no matter their field of study.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Without ``proficient'' skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
``It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things,'' said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioural and social science research organization.

Why does the above not surprise me?
I have visited the US on several occasions & I have worked with Americans for several years. Whilst I’ve found the majority of Americans quite pleasant, I have also found them to be lacking in general knowledge of the world around them but the really worrying thing about the above article is that it relates to college students, what are the Americans who haven’t attended college like?