"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." The article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr develops the idea that the human mind is changing the way it used to think. New technology and the internet has changed the way our brain thinks, learns, and receives information.


The article mentions how research that once required days in libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks, and we obtain the fact or quote we were after. The internet is becoming the main source of how our mind obtains information. Scott Karp, who writes blogs about online media, confessed that he has stopped reading books.  “I was a lit major in college, and used to be a voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened? What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

The article also states how Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, has also mentioned how the Internet has altered his mental abilities. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote.




Thanks to new technologies such as the internet and text-messaging, we may be reading more today than we did back in the day. But it's a different kind of reading with a different kind of thinking. "We are not what we read, we are how we read." Says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. She explains that reading is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Depending on the way we practice reading will affect the way our mind learns to read and think. Whether it is by continuing with the trend of using the internet to facilitate the way we obtain information, by spending long hours with a book, or both. That will determine the way our mind learns and thinks.



Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 01 July 2008. Web. 04 Mar. 2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>.

The article "Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees" from the New York Times states that the United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees.  Today, the US ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.  If the United States wants to hold on to its place as a world leader then it is imperative that we identify the causes of this decline and implement corrective steps immediately. 

The problem is not that we have worsen our quality of education, it is that we have not progressed since the time when we once led back in the 1980's. If we were to compare 60 year olds with young people today, 40% of both age groups have a college degree. This proves how our level of education has not progressed. Canada leads the world in educational attainment with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least associate’s degrees in 2007, compared with only 40 percent in the United States.


The problem is in our K-12 education.  The article mentions that other than making college more affordable, we're in need of more state-financial preschools programs, better high school and middle school college counseling, dropout prevention programs, an alignment with international curricular standards and improved quality of teaching.


In China, students have longer school days and school years than the students in the United States. The article "US Surpassed in Education Ratings" mentions that China has rigorous academic standards that focus mostly on math and science. They're students are pushed through the K-12 system and are guaranteed spots in major universities. That birth to college graduation mentality does not exist in America, and it needs to change in order for us to climb back to the top and lead the world in education once again.



Lewin, Tamar. "Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 July 2010. Web. 02 Mar. 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/education/23college.html?_r=1&.

Umpierre, Chris. "U.S. Surpassed in Education Ratings." The News-Press. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Mar. 2015. http://archive.news-press.com/article/20111002/NEWS0104/110020363/U-S-surpassed-education-ratings.

More US students are staying in school. According to data released from the Census Bureau, just 7% of the nation’s 18-to-24 year olds dropped out of high school, continuing a steady decline in the nation’s dropout rate since 2000, when 12% of youth were dropouts. This is an all time record low.

The main cause for the national dropout rate decline is because of the significant decrease in dropouts from Hispanic and black students. Less and less Hispanics and African-Americans are dropping out, even though they still remain as the highest percentage of dropouts from all races in the US educational system. Non-Hispanic and Asian dropout rates have also decreased but they have kept a relatively steady and low dropout rate throughout the past decade. Hispanics have the highest dropout rate among all racial and ethnic groups. They reached a record low of 14% in 2013, compared to 32% of dropouts in 2000. 79% of Hispanics had completed high school in 2013, compared with 60% in 2000.


This report showed significant progress over the past decade among Hispanic youth. There are not only fewer high school dropouts, but more are graduating from high school and are attending college. This makes sense because if more students are graduating, then the next step is to pursue a post secondary education. According to the new data, among college students ages 18 to 24, Hispanics accounted for 18% of college enrollment in 2013, up from 12% in 2009. Even though more Hispanics are attending college, they still trail white youth in obtaining bachelor's degrees. Hispanic students account for just 9% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) with a bachelor’s degree. While whites account for about 58% of students ages 18 to 24 enrolled in college and 69% of young adults with a bachelor’s degree.


Fry, Richard. "U.S. High School Dropout Rate Reaches Record Low, Driven by Improvements among Hispanics, Blacks." Pew Research Center RSS. N.p., 02 Oct. 2014. Web. 11 Feb. 2015. <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-high-school-dropout-rate-reaches-record-low-driven-by-improvements-among-hispanics-blacks/>.

Schools have always told their students that in order to live a happy and financially successful life they must go to college. But with the rising cost of college over the past decades, the argument of whether attending college is worth the cost has been highly active. Kristen Sturt from the artical Is College Worth It Anymore? and Kristin Tate from the artical For Many Students, College Isn't Worth It Anymore have both researched this issue in depth and have come to many conclusions.

The article "Is College Worth It Anymore?" by Kristen Sturt focuses more on how college isn't really worth the cost but that a High School diploma also isn't enough to be financially successful. She mentions how student debt currently averages $29,400 per student how that should be a good reason for exploring other options. The article also mentions a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center found that while 60 percent of those in science fields said their major was very closely related to their line of work, 28 percent of employed Social Science, Liberal Arts, and Education majors said their studies didn't relate to their current job at all. Another 29 percent said it was not very close. It's recommended that you should major in computer science, but not everyone can do that. The article mentions that other countries, with low unemployment rates, have different opportunities to enter the workforce. For example, students in Australia go though a Vocational Education and Training(VET), a skilled trade program boasting an 86 percent employment rate between the ages of 25 and 32.



The article also compares the differences between high school graduates and college graduates. According to National Center for Education Statistics, the average salary for a college graduate between the ages 25 and 32 was $46,900 in 2012. For those with only a high school diploma, it was 30,000. And the numbers have dropped since 1979. Also, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014 college graduates had a 2,9 percent unemployment rate. For high school graduates, it was 5.3 percent, and for those without a high school diploma it was 8.4 percent. And in 2012, 6 percent of college graduates ages 25 to 32 lived in poverty, while those with no college was a 22 percent.

The article "For Many Students College Isn't Worth It Anymore-Here's Why" by Kristin Tate focuses more on the cost of college and student debt. It states that tuition for public and private colleges have increased by 500% over the last 30 years with an average cost of $29,000 and 53% of recent graduates end up jobless or underemployed. Sources like NBC and CNN dispense headlines like "Thanks to rising tuition and tough job market, college seniors graduated with $27,000 in debt."



The article also mentions how government loans and grants were created to help low income families to afford college but almost 60% of students borrow money to pay for their education. This lets colleges continue to increase their cost because many students qualify and can count on government money to pay their education. "As it stands now, college is clearly not worth the debt for many young people." 14% of waiters and 16.5 or bartenders in the US have a bachelor's degree, and 85% of students move back with Mom and Dad after graduation.



In order for more people to be able to afford college, the government has to decrease or stop giving money so that colleges have to be forced to lower tuition to remain competitive and attract their students. But as of now, the important question is not whether college is worth the cost, it is it whether college is worth it for you.

Sturt, Kristen. "Is College Worth It Anymore?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/04/college-cost-benefit_n_6057262.html>.

Tate, Kristin. "For Many Students, College Isn’t Worth It Anymore – Here’s Why." Ben Swann Truth In Media. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. <http://benswann.com/college-not-worth-it-for-some-students-heres-why>.

Unemployment is significantly escalating especially among the less skilled, and many are questioning whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st century. Paul E. Peterson, Ludger Woessmann, Eric A Hanushek and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon created a paper titled "Are students Ready to Compete?" that examines the educational proficiency of students in America. Presently, the challenge seems to be in math, science, and engineering. Therefore, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Coalition was formed in 2006 to raise awareness on how important these subjects are. In the past, teachers and administrators decided the level of math proficiency that students were required, but now the states and federal government established proficiency levels for students to reach. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standard was set by the U.S. Department of Education. According to the paper, in 2007 32% of 8th graders in public and private schools in the US performed at or above the NAEP proficiency standard in math and 31% performed at or above that level in reading.


The world's proficiency levels are assessed by the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA). US students in the class of 2011, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA.  Six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong had a great amount of students performing at least at the proficiency level, while the United States had less than one-third. Shanghai topped the list with a 75 percent math proficiency rate, over twice the 32 percent rate of the United States. The US reading proficiency was 31%, ranked 17th among the nations of the world. We consider ourselves to be one of the top countries of the world, but our proficiency levels are relatively low compared to the rest of the world.

The article "Young people reading a lot less" by David Mehegan in The Boston Globe explains how this generation spends a significant amount of time watching television, surfing the Web, listening to music and using their phones, but less time reading. A report done by the National Endowment for the Arts released eye-catching information. The report states that only 30% of 13 year olds read almost every day. The number of 17 year olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004, and almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure. The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading. Also, only about a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level. Shockingly, things are not much better among college students. In 2005, almost 40 percent of college freshmen (and 35 percent of seniors) read nothing at all for pleasure, and 26 percent (28 percent of seniors) read less than one hour per week. Even among college graduates, reading proficiency declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003. This generation's students are not being educated properly, giving them a lower probability to succeed. Things need to change, both in the educational system and in the student's effort in order to improve and create a more sophisticated leading nation.


Mehegan, David. "Young People Reading a Lot Less." Boston.com. The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2007. Web. 02 Feb. 2015.  http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/19/young_people_reading_a_lot_less/?page=full

Peterson, Paul E., Ludger Woessmann, Eric A. Hanushek, and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon. "Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete? - Education Next." RSS. N.p., 16 Aug. 2011. Web. 01 Feb. 2015 http://educationnext.org/are-u-s-students-ready-to-compete/

In this blog I'm going to be exploring America's youth and whether or not they are prepared for the challenges ahead.

1 Is our education system adequate for the 21st century skills?
2 Do students today take school more or less seriously than previous generations?
3 Is technology making us more stupid?
4 Are other countries preparing their students for the future?
5 Does your culture affect your probability to succeed in America?