US literacy in decline, costing billions

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"Low US literacy rates cost the nation 'tens of billions of dollars' a year while harming the country's economic competitiveness," the Financial Express wrote in December.

According to the findings of the latest US Department of Education survey, about 30 million of the U.S. adult population lack basic English skills. The 10 percent drop in literacy compared to a study conducted 11 years earlier cannot only be attributed to the increasingly multicultural society, but rather show a general decline in U.S. literacy rates.

The US also scored average or below average on most literacy measures in a separate seven-nation study conducted in 2003 by the OECD along with US and Canadian statistical agencies.

"It's appalling - it's really astounding," Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association is cited in the Washington Post, "Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder."

"The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don't have a good explanation," says Mark Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. "It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV."

The Conservative Voice estimates some 1.1 million of US adults to be illiterate completely thus lacking "the skills to perform everyday tasks" and 11 million to be not literate in English, but in another language.

According to Cecelia Rouse, an Economics Professor at Princeton University, low literacy costs the US about 8 billion in lost earnings and billion in lost state and federal income taxes for each class of 18-year-olds who never complete high school.

Beyond the 30 million Americans with below-basic English skills, the Education Department survey found a total of 90 million with skills too poor to function effectively at work, the Financial Express writes.

Sources:

The Denver Post, Financial Express, The Conservative Voice, The News Tribune