Milk vs. Cream?

Acute discovery from 1928

Which of the following is the best synonym for acute: pretty, austere, chilly, sharp? One hundred such austere, even chilly, questions, were administered 50 years ago to University of Minnesota freshmen; they were also asked to answer questions based on about 40 short reading samples. The freshmen did pretty well: 60% were sharp (or acute) enough to get a score of 26 or better on the vocabulary test. Fifty years later, the man who devised the 1928 Minnesota test, Alvin C. Eurich, 77, now president of the nonprofit Academy for Educational Development, decided to give the very same exam to modern Minnesota freshmen. The results, announced last week: the 1978 students did worse than their counterparts of 1928. Only half scored at least 26 on the vocabulary portion of the exam. Worse, only 19% scored above 20 on a speed-reading exam, a standard that nearly half of the 1928 students had met.

Altogether, Eurich estimates, the 1978 freshmen read no better than 1928 high school seniors. "Students today have greater difficulty in understanding what they read," he says. "Instructors have to adapt to a lower level of reading ability in the texts they assign and the amount they can expect students to cover." Indeed, in 1928, roughly half of Minnesota high school students studied Latin or another foreign language, and they learned to cope with knotty classic texts. Today Latin is offered in only 16 of the state's 600 secondary schools, and English courses are less structured and demanding. There is another big difference between then and now. In 1928, observes Don Johansen, the state's supervisor of secondary education, only about 12% of the college-age population went to college. About half a century later, that figure is estimated at 45.5%. College, says Johansen, "is no longer only for the cream of the crop. In this study, we're comparing 1978 milk to 1928 cream." In 1978 as in 1928, the University of Minnesota accepted for admission any graduate of a Minnesota high school.

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