Illiterate College Student

By | October 24, 2025

[October 24, 2025]  Some professors will say that the probability of a college student being illiterate is impossible.  This conclusion is understandable because high schools across America require basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Or, at least we thought.  A young woman at the University of Connecticut is illiterate, and they’re more.

Nineteen year old Aleysha Ortiz was attending UConn to study Public Policy. She remembers moving from Puerto Rico to Connecticut as a child and the excitement she and her family had for this opportunity. But the opportunities from Aleysha never materialized.

She graduated from the Hartford, CT public school system with honors. But Aleysha says she still doesn’t know how to read or write. In a serious world, one should not be able to attend college without having a high level of intelligence, to include advanced reading, writing, and arithmetic capabilities. And, this is important, in addition to having these skills, one should also be strongly inclined toward higher education.

There are many who don’t need or want college. There are positions available with training in good-paying jobs that require no formal higher education. They are there for those who want them. This list includes folks who are extremely intelligent and hard driven.  College is not what it’s chalked up to be.

We have now degraded college so much that anyone can attend and without knowing how to read or write. I’m not writing about those who have yet to master a high-level reading ability or understand the greatest works of mankind, but there are some who cannot read a single word.

When I was a kid, you had to know how to read at a basic level by second grade. Today, I think the requirement is by the first grade. Why is that?  The entire formal educational system is an unmitigated disaster and has failed to teach those desirous of higher education.

The idea to improve people’s lives by sending them to college is no longer a workable solution.  A high school education or college education doesn’t mean what it means 50 years ago.  The idea to improve people’s lives through higher education no longer works as intended.  Creating a false expectation that education automatically bestows a better life is wrong, and I think people are now waking up to that fact.

There are simply folks in America and the West that should not go to college.  Aleysha is one of them.  The formal education system in America engaged in a social experiment by allowing Aleysha into their higher education institutions with the assumption she could learn how to read and write, somehow, on her own.  That assumption failed her.

The proliferation of junk degrees leads to the inevitable conclusion that college now is largely a scam.  Charlie Kirk was famous for that line, too bad he was killed at the time he was making inroads into college campuses all across America.

There are too many people in education leadership positions that are convinced that the social engineering they are conducting will somehow work.  Lesson: it will not work, it is not working, and it will never work.  There is no shortcuts to improved education and while our current system “sucks” there is yet anything that can replace it.

We’ve bet the farm of our system and we lost.

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Author: Douglas R. Satterfield

Hello. I provide one article every day. My writings are influenced by great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jung, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Jean Piaget, Erich Neumann, and Jordan Peterson, whose insight and brilliance have gotten millions worldwide to think about improving ourselves. Thank you for reading my blog.

11 thoughts on “Illiterate College Student

  1. Paulette_Schroeder

    The American education institution continues to fail and will continue to do so as long as they adopt the radical neo-Marxist victimization model of teaching.

    Reply
  2. JT Patterson

    This. Is what “compassion” does. “We have now degraded college so much that anyone can attend and without knowing how to read or write. I’m not writing about those who have yet to master a high-level reading ability or understand the greatest works of mankind, but there are some who cannot read a single word.” – Gen. Doug Satterfield.

    Reply
  3. Jason Bourne

    The idea that “compassion” is a higher order trait and should stand up to other personality traits is a HUGE mistake of the first kind. Being “respectful”, for example, doesn’t mean be respectful, but be kind and polite. This is different. But, as Gen. Satterfield has pointed out (I couldn’t find the reference) that “compassion kills” when introduced as the higher order value. It simply doesn’t scale up to large groups like a classroom or something larger. Compassion means not upholding tough but necessary standards of behavior. That is necessary to progress in an industrial modern society.

    Reply
    1. Karl J.

      Still, an important point being made here is that our education system is beyond broken, and yet in my opinion, it’s the state school unions that are perpetuating this kind of “education.’ The main effort is just to get the teachers paid, nothing else matters. Oh, and occasionally pad the pockets of the teacher union bosses.

      Reply
      1. North of Austin

        No surprises there. The unions are highly corrupt in education. Teachers have no idea that their money is going to Democrat Party elections without their consent. Maybe they don’t care or maybe they’re woke anyway and it doesn’t matter.

        Reply
  4. Unwoke Dude

    Good article, sir. I’m glad my kids are out of school now with good jobs, and thanks to some tough and high demanding teachers. Today, those teachers would be fired for being “too hard” on their students. But they are exactly what we need. And this shows when there are kids who are advanced just because they are from a minority group.

    Reply
  5. New Girl

    I’m not surprised in the least. Schools have consciously chosen to lower academic standards to show their “respect” for students of color who cannot achieve basic reading, writing and arithmetic. Lower IQs are not progressed by lowering the academic standards. Who would have thought?

    Reply

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