Most College Grads Fail Simple Tests, Study Finds : Learning: More than 50% can’t read a bus schedule. Experts call for re-examination of higher education.

More than half of U.S. residents with college degrees can’t consistently figure out how much change they should get back from a lunch bill or how to read a complicated bus schedule, according to a little-known compilation of scores from the U.S. Department of Education’s recent survey on adult literacy.

Although America’s college graduates fare better than the adult population as a whole in basic literacy skills, some educational experts said the scores were still dismal enough to prompt a re-examination of how--and what--universities are teaching undergraduates.

The scores were compiled by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., for the Wingspread Group on Higher Education, a 16-member panel assembled by former U.S. Secretary of Labor William E. Brock and supported by four foundations, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Based in part on those scores, the group issued a highly critical report earlier this month warning of a college system that “risks national decline.” It concluded that there is a “mismatch between what is needed of higher education and what is provided,” and criticized undergraduate education as “little more than secondary school material--warmed over and re-offered at much higher expense.”

Brock, former Republican Party chairman and now an international trade consultant in Washington, said Tuesday that panel members were “shocked incredibly” when they received the compilation of college-related literacy scores during their six-month study.

“It ought to terrify everybody,” Brock said. “We don’t teach people (in college) to read, to write, to communicate orally--those are such basic things.”

But Irwin S. Kirsch, ETS literacy director and project director for the adult study, said the results are tempered by the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who scored in the lowest two levels of the literacy scale for college graduates were either 65 and older or foreign-born. These people typically had more trouble with test questions because of physical limitations or difficulties understanding English, he said.

The scores of college graduates were part of a larger study conducted during 1992 by the Department of Education, which tested more than 26,000 randomly selected people 16 years or older. Hoping to establish a national benchmark for literacy skills, researchers ranked participants on five levels of competency according to how well they consistently performed everyday tasks requiring printed information, documents such as charts and graphs, and basic math. They were considered competent if they successfully completed a task 80% of the time.

The study, which was released in September, concluded that 49% of the nation’s adult population is “at-risk” in today’s information-driven society because it possesses only the barest of language and math skills. An estimated 90 million people are only able to perform simple tasks in the two lowest levels of competency--adding numbers on bank deposit slips, finding an intersection on a street map or understanding an appliance warranty.

The report did not emphasize the college graduate results, which went largely unnoticed until specifically compiled for the Wingspread Group last fall. The scores posted by the 4,787 college graduates, a testing sample representing 34.1 million people, show they did better in comparison to the overall group.

Still, 16% of those holding bachelor’s degrees and 11% of those who pursued graduate studies were mired on the bottom two rungs of the literacy ladder--unable to do such things as figure out the difference between sales and regular price for an advertised item, even with a calculator.

Many college graduates reached the third level of competency on the test, the statistics showed. They could write a letter explaining a credit card billing error, calculate mileage from a chart and log information into a car maintenance schedule.

But half or more of those with four-year degrees couldn’t perform tasks required in the fourth and fifth levels of competency on the test--tasks that required multiple calculations or synthesizing information. They couldn’t consistently use a table to deduce the pattern of oil imports over the years, compare two metaphors in a poem, or use information in a pamphlet to figure how much a couple would receive in Supplemental Security Income.

“In the area of quantitative skills, for example, 56.3% of American-born, four-year college graduates are unable consistently to perform simple tasks such as calculating the change from $3 after buying a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich,” the Wingspread report noted. “Tasks such as these should not be insuperable for people with 16 years of education.”

The Wingspread report said it was distressing that only 8% to 12% of the four-year college graduates reached the highest levels of competency. For graduate students, the range was 12% to 17%. These tasks include using a calculator to figure out how much it would cost to carpet a room or comparing different approaches in a narrative.