Seven years of college, down the drain

A new study suggests college students nearing their degrees are, for lack of a better term, dunces:

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Let's see, they can't understand newspapers (political blogs?) or novels, can't understand simple forms, can't balance a checkbook and can't leave a correct tip. Nothing in there about identifying the characters on Survivor Island or running up credit cards on internet porn, so apparently those skills are intact.

In the spirit of Bluto, who do we blame? Do we blame the students for not knowing what they need and not asking, since "they're passing"? Do we blame the teachers, who apparently don't have time to squeeze practical instruction around their incessant rants about the Iraq war? Or do we blame the university deans, who prop up these shells of learning while gleefully raising tuitions every third sunrise? How about ESPN for showing too much college sports?

Or, do we just blame the president and the vice-president? I'm going with Bush and that bald guy with glasses.