And it’s not just because of disparate skill levels among different segments of the U.S. population — as bad as that would be if that were the only reason.
Rather, the report notes that even the top-scoring and “most-educated” U.S. millennials are trailing behind similarly situated millennials in most other participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, nations when it comes to skills in the realms of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in “technology-rich environments.”
“The data reveal that in relative terms, our millennials do not perform favorably in comparison to their peers internationally,” states the report, titled “AMERICA’S SKILLS CHALLENGE: Millennials and the Future.”
“This holds true even for our best performing and most educated millennials, those who are our native born, and those with the greatest socioeconomic advantage,” the report states.
More specifically, the report on millennials — or those born after 1980 — shows that:
• Even though a greater percentage of young adults in the United States have been attaining higher levels of education since 2003, the numeracy scores of U.S. millennials whose highest level of education is “high school” and “above high school” have declined, from 264 to 247 and from 296 to 285, respectively, on a 500-point scale.
