'This Is How College Students Talk Today...'

This is how college students talk today pic.twitter.com/ArxL3fjpiA

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 20, 2019

"My name is Joan Miller, I am a doctoral candidate at USC," a student said at the MSNBC forum. "I study empathy as communication. My pronouns are 'she,' 'her,' 'hers'. Yesterday we talked a lot about individual responsibility of change behavior like veganism, water waste and plastic straw bans, all of which initiatives disproportionately affect disabled people and poor people. Besides the carbon tax in these individual responsibilities, how can we shift the responsibility to incentivize corporations and high waste industries to change their behavior around climate change?"

Highlights

• When controlled for educational attainment, adults' vocabulary skills have declined.

• The vocabulary of U.S. college graduates was lower in the 2010s vs. the late 1970s.

• Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment.

• The decline in vocabulary is primarily a time period effect.

Abstract

We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.