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U.S. Millennials Fall Far Behind Educational Average
America’s educational system is failing millennials. Badly.
Granted, this age group is likely to be the most educated generation in American history, but according to a study by the Educational Testing Service, they rank among the bottom in the world for literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments (PS-TRE).
ETS dug into test results conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), singled out the cohort born after 1980, and broke them down by country. Here are the disturbing results:
- Literacy: Out of 22 participating countries, U.S. millennials ranked third from the bottom, beating only Spain and Italy.
- Numeracy: U.S. millennials ranked last, tied with Spain and Italy.
- PS-TRE: U.S. millennials also ranked last, along with the Slovak Republic, Ireland, and Poland.
Not only that, when ETS singled out the top-performing millennials, U.S. students still ranked second to last. Even though a higher percentage of young adults are getting higher levels of education, the numeracy scores have dropped. America is handing out more and more diplomas while actual learning is dropping lower and lower.
Looking at this dismal state of affairs, many well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) critics will say, “A-ha! We need to increase school budgets to fix this mess.” That argument might be more compelling if it weren’t for another OECD study.
As the chart shows, the U.S. spends more on education per student than any other developed nation. In 2010, America spent over $11,000 per elementary student and over $12,000 per high schooler. Adding in college and post-secondary vocational training, the U.S. spent a whopping $15,171 on each student.
We’re spending more money on education, sending our kids to more classrooms, but we’re getting inferior results. Education needs to change structurally if we are to compete in the global economy.
That’s where school choice comes in. Instead of flooding resources into our broken system, we need to change the paradigm. Parents, not government bureaucrats, should have the freedom to choose the best education for a their child. We need to encourage healthy competition among schools and education styles so that all programs have an incentive to improve.
The one-size-fits-all education model obviously isn’t working for the U.S. It’s past time to allow students access to the education that works best for them, to provide incentives for them to achieve, and to motivate schools to improve.
Published in General
1) We used to be? According to whom?
We are, where it matters: i.e. higher education.
2) There are plenty of reasons why the US…overall…would not do as well as tiny homogeneous populations comprised of Swiss and Finns. Maybe, Swiss and Finns are just…genetically smarter than the overall US population?
4) When you break up the US into its constitute States, you see a different picture. As I said, Massachusetts alone is #1 or close to it in the world (average scores in reading, for example, close to 570)
But simply because the US is so much larger, with so much greater heterogeneity (not just in socio-economic status, but also in racial and ethnic backgrounds than, say, Finland)…it is unreasonable to compare with such populations.
You compare like with like. The like closest to, Finland, for example, may be Minnesota or Wisconsin.
Mississippi isn’t like Finland or Switzerland, or Hong Kong or Macau.
Unless, of course, you don’t think that genetics differences related to racial or ethnic background, don’t exist, in terms of intelligence. But, they do.
I’m with AIG too—it’s a phenomenon I got very tired of back when Bush was president and my liberal friends were certain everything that went wrong was his fault, declared themselves determined to emigrate should he win a second term, and basically claimed he was the Anti-Christ. Now all my conservative friends are doing the same thing with Obama. It’s frankly the least interesting feature of these debates.
Denmark used to be both a much poorer and more ethnically homogeneous country than it is today. If you tested Danish students in, say, 1950 —relatively poor, stressed and disrupted by recent German occupation—-and compared them with American students, you’d find that Danes on average looked like a bunch of morons.
My husband taught high school for seventeen years, and he could tell you plenty about the ways that poverty, disruption and stress/trauma impact both academic performance and what we measure as “intelligence.”
I’ll bet you that prosperous, NATO-defended peaceful Denmark has gotten a whole lot smarter on average, even as its ethnic homogeneity has diminished.
At some point during the Bush-Gore contest, some news outlet published their old SAT scores and —big surprise here— by that standard, Bush was dumber than Gore and both of them were dumber than I am (even on the math part!). And while I found this very gratifying at the time (and yes, my husband thought it was pathetic that I even remembered my SAT scores) it was also a lesson in how tests test test-taking, not “intelligence” because, trust me, you don’t want me running your local convenience store, let alone a country.
Oh, and by the way, Bush scored lower than my nephew, who is pure African, with not even a drop of old, Scots-Irish overseer’s “intelligence” forcibly introduced into his DNA.
Hmm. A lot of interesting stuff by looking at their grades.
Gore scored a D in “natural science” ;) I guess that explains a lot.
Then again, Bush scored a C in economics. So, there’s that too.
What I’m surprised is how some of these guys, Bush, Gore, Kerry etc managed to even graduate. The standards must have been a lot lower back then, because these days you need at least a 2.00 GPA to graduate from undergrad (and a 3.00 to graduate from graduate school)
If Kerry’s first-year average was a 1.6, today he would have been kicked out. No way they’re going to let you go onto your second year with a 1.6 GPA.
This might explain the supposed “grade inflation” stuff that people keep talking about. It may be to the fact that anyone below a 2.0 is kicked out of school now, thus leading to higher overall averages if the lower performers are no longer in the pool of students.
Fortunately for all of us, we get smarter as we get older. Right?
Ok. Get to it. Good luck!