{"id":1275,"date":"2026-07-06T02:57:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T02:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2026-07-06T02:57:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T02:57:26","slug":"college-students-in-the-usa-and-worldwide-are-exhibiting-the-same-comprehension-as-10-year-olds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/college-students-in-the-usa-and-worldwide-are-exhibiting-the-same-comprehension-as-10-year-olds\/","title":{"rendered":"COLLEGE STUDENTS IN THE USA AND WORLDWIDE ARE EXHIBITING THE SAME COMPREHENSION AS 10-YEAR OLDS!!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"recurrent-article-hero entry-header article-hero\" aria-label=\"Article Hero\">\n<div class=\"mb-5 article-header-wrapper\">\n<h1 class=\"article-title\">College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds<\/h1>\n<div class=\"article-dek\">Are you smarter than a 4th grader?<\/div>\n<div class=\"flex\">\n<div class=\"article-byline \">\n<div class=\"item-wrapper--google-add item-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"byline-item byline-item-google-add\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"archive-post-thumb article-featured-image w-full h-auto mb-3\" src=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1152\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1152px) 100vw, 1152px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=50 50w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=280 280w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=289 289w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=308 308w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=324 324w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=600 600w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=675 675w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=768 768w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=990 990w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1024 1024w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1128 1128w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1250 1250w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1337 1337w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1440 1440w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1536 1536w, https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=2048 2048w\" alt=\"A stylized photo illustration featuring a college student on his laptop with his hands placed over his mouth in a gesture of anxiety and difficulty.\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"article-layout-wrapper w-full flex flex-col lg:flex-row gap-5 max-w-full \">\n<article id=\"post-445294\" class=\"flex-auto post-445294 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail category-education category-future-society exclude_tag-yahoo-commerce author_tag-jwilkins\">\n<section class=\"entry-content pw-content-edge-targeting\">\n<div>\n<figure class=\"article-featured-image-figure\"><figcaption class=\"article-featured-image-caption\"><span class=\"article-featured-image-caption-text\"> Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Shutterstock <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<div class=\"content-wrapper\">\n<section class=\"recurrent-blocks recurrent-newsletter-block recurrent-newsletter-email-block recurrent-newsletter-email-block-on-top pw-incontent-excluded flipboard-remove \">\n<div class=\"container newsletter-container\">\n<div class=\"newsletter-content\" data-layer-pushed=\"1\">\n<div class=\"newsletter-signup-form-wrapper\">\n<form action=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-admin\/admin-ajax.php\" method=\"post\" novalidate=\"\" data-module=\"NewsletterModule\" data-module-uid=\"60ae1442-b481-446b-bab1-45f36adc3f6c\"><\/form>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p class=\"pw-incontent-excluded article-paragraph skip\">Gone are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/11\/22\/651094749\/heres-what-college-freshmen-are-reading\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the days<\/a> of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume\u2019s \u201cTales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">According to a new \u201cSurvey of Adult Skills\u201d conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development \u2014\u00a0a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries \u2014 a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">The survey, first spotted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/international\/2026\/06\/25\/students-are-doing-worse-than-you-think\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">by the <em>Economist<\/em><\/a>, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">The numbers aren\u2019t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent \u2014 only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">It seems there are numerous compounding explanations for these test results: pandemic-era learning gaps leading to lower levels of preparation, declining college enrollment forcing schools to lower admissions standards, and lower levels of public funding for education, to name a few.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">The results also coincide with the explosion of large language models like ChatGPT, which by <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/grade-inflation-ai\">many<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-destroying-generation-students\">accounts<\/a> have carved out a new floor for academic failure in both <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-teens-homework-study\">K-12<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-college-students-homogenized\">college-level<\/a> education.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">While there\u2019s no denying how complicated the issue is, there is evidence that removing technology from classrooms altogether could offer an immediate boost.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">In one classroom in Minneapolis, for example, a literature and English teacher <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/future-society\/students-reading-improves-no-tech-class\">banned phones and laptops<\/a>, requiring all coursework to be done on pencil and paper. As the school-year started in September, just 46 percent of the students involved said they felt confident about their reading skills. A few months later in February, that number stood at 95 percent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Though it\u2019s just one classroom, something is clearly off the rails in the education systems of the richest countries of the world \u2014 and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more students will be pushed into the world with the reading skills of 4th graders.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds Are you smarter than a 4th grader? Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1276,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions\/1276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}