• Introduction
• Highlights
• Reflections on the Results
• Reference

This is one in a series of reports that examines the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), a cooperative effort of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Division of Adult Education and Literacy of the U.S. Department of Education. This report focuses primarily on the literacy skills of the nation's civilian labor force, including the employed and unemployed.

Many past studies of adult literacy have tried to count the number of "illiterates" in this nation, thereby treating literacy as a condition that individuals either do or do not have. We believe that such efforts are inherently arbitrary and misleading. They are also damaging in that they fail to acknowledge both the complexity of the literacy problem and the range of solutions needed to address it.

NALS is based on a different concept of literacy and, therefore, takes a different approach to measuring it. The aim of this survey is to document the English literacy of adults in the United States based on their performance across a wide array of tasks that reflect the types of materials and demands they encounter in their daily lives.

To gather the information on adults' literacy skills, trained staff interviewed nearly 13,600 individuals age 16 and older during the first 8 months of 1992. These participants had been randomly selected to represent the adult population in the country as a whole. In addition, about another 1,000 adults were surveyed in each of 12 states that chose to participate in a special study designed to provide state-level results that are comparable to the national data. Finally, some 1,100 inmates from 80 federal and state prisons were interviewed to gather information on the proficiencies of the prison population. Prisoners are not a part of the nation's labor force, however, and their results were excluded from this report.¹

Each survey participant was asked to spend approximately an hour responding to a series of diverse literacy tasks as well as questions about his or her demographic characteristics, educational background, labor force status, job characteristics, reading practices, and other areas related to literacy. Based on their responses to the survey tasks, adults received proficiency scores along three scales that reflect varying degrees of skill in prose, document, and quantitative literacy.² The scales are powerful tools that make it possible to explore the proportions of adults in different subpopulations of interest who demonstrated various levels of performance.

This report analyzes the literacy proficiencies of the nation's noninstitutionalized adult population. Data for the nation's civilian labor force are analyzed with respect to certain sub-populations, such as the employed and unemployed, as well as demographic and socioeconomic subgroups of employed civilians. The report also compares the literacy proficiencies of workers in major occupations and industries and analyzes the relationship between literacy proficiencies and weekly wages and annual earnings. Some of the major findings are highlighted here.

• Mean literacy proficiencies on all three scales-prose, document, and quantitative-were higher for adults participating in the labor force than for those outside of the labor force.

• Thirty-nine to 43 percent of the labor force scored at the two lowest levels of literacy proficiency, while only one out of four labor force participants scored at the two highest levels of proficiency, and only 3 to 5 percent scored at Level 5, the highest proficiency level.

• Younger adults (ages 16 to 65) who were not in the labor force had higher literacy proficiencies than older adults (over the age of 65), on average. One-third of those ages 16 to 65 who were neither working nor looking for work had proficiencies equal to or greater than the average for all labor force participants.

• On the document and quantitative scales, full-time employees outperformed part-time employees (table A). Both groups had much higher average literacy proficiencies than the unemployed. In general, unemployment rates among labor force participants who scored in Level 1 were four to seven times higher than those of participants in Level 5.

Table A.—Distribution of adults across the literacy levels, by labor force status: 1992

• The mean scores of full-time employed men and women were similar on each of the three literacy scales, with women faring slightly better than men on the prose scale (by 7 points) and men performing slightly better than women on the quantitative scale (by 4 points).

• The oldest age groups of full-time employed civilians (ages 55 to 64 and age 65 and older) had the lowest proficiency scores, on average, while those ages 35 to 44 had the highest.

• On each literacy scale, mean proficiencies were higher for white full-time employees, followed by Asian, black, and Hispanic full-time employees.

• Foreign-born full-time workers who had lived in the United States for 10 years or less had significantly lower average literacy proficiency scores than native-born full-time workers.

• The mean literacy scores of the full-time employed were positively related to educational attainment. The mean scores of college graduates were higher than those of high school graduates, which were higher than the mean scores of high school dropouts.

• The highest mean literacy proficiencies were posted by workers in the finance, insurance, and real estate industries and the public administration sector. Workers in goods-producing industries (agriculture, construction, manufacturing, mining) had the lowest proficiencies, on average.

• Mean literacy proficiencies were highest for professional workers, followed by managers, administrators, and technical workers. Mean scores were lowest for semiskilled and unskilled blue-collar workers and for farm, forestry, and fishing workers.

• The literacy proficiencies of the employed were positively and strongly associated with their weekly and annual earnings. On the prose scale, mean weekly earnings ranged from $355 for full-time workers in Level 1 to $531 for those in Level 3 to a high of $910 for those in Level 5.

• The weekly earnings impact of higher literacy scores was smaller for workers who had completed some high school (9th to 12th grade, no diploma) and largest for those with a 2- or 4-year degree.

• The direct earnings effect of higher literacy proficiencies was larger for older workers than for younger workers. For example, comparing the annual earnings of workers in Level 3 with those in Level 1, the relative earnings ratio rises from 1.10 for 16- to 24-year-olds to 1.78 for 45- to 54-year-olds.

• The literacy proficiencies of the poor or near poor (those living in households with a combined money income below 125 percent of the poverty line) and of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients were well below average on each of the scales. However, poor or near poor adults who were in the labor force had higher average proficiencies than those not in the labor force.

• Less than 5 percent of those in the labor force had ever participated in any basic skills training outside of their high school. However, labor force participants with lower literacy proficiencies were more likely than those with higher proficiencies to have received basic skills training in the past 5 years. Even so, only 6 percent of labor force participants in Level 1 had received basic skills training during the past 5 years.

• Among those who said they had received some basic skills training since leaving school, only 4 out of 10 indicated that the training was provided by anemployerr or labor union.

These results do not answer the question: "Are the literacy skills of our nation's workers adequate?" They do, however, provide some critical information about the literacy levels of those in and those not in the labor force, as well as the employed and the unemployed. Overall, civilians in the labor force displayed higher literacy skills than those out of the labor force, and employed workers outperformed the unemployed.

Still, about 40 percent of those in the labor force posted literacy scores in the lowest two levels. Moreover, less than 5 percent of labor force participants had received any recent training in these basic skills. Together, these findings paint a bleak outlook for the future of the U.S. labor market. On the positive side, however, the mean literacy scores of the full-time employed rose from the youngest age group to the 35-44 age group, then declined as age increased. These results indicate that newer entrants into the full-time labor force will have stronger average literacy proficiencies than those who will be retiring over the next decade, thereby raising the average proficiency of the labor force.

In addition, the rising annual earnings differentials between college and high school graduates appear to reflect, in part, a rising economic payoff to literacy proficiencies. Those who earn a college degree possess considerably stronger literacy skills and are more likely to be rewarded for their skills with higher earnings and faster wage growth.

Analyses of literacy proficiencies by occupation and major industry revealed large variability across sectors, partially due to the educational requirements of certain occupations and industrial groups. While workers in the finance,insurancee, and real estate industries and the public administration sector posted relatively high proficiencies, many frontline, blue-collar workers within the goods-producing industries displayed quite limited skills. Given that 60 percent performed in Level 1 or 2 on the prose and document scales, further investments in the literacy skills of our frontline workers may help to improve our productivity and future economic competitiveness.

Literacy skills are strongly related to weekly and annual earnings overall and for most demographic and socioeconomic subgroups of the employed, although the relationship is considerably weaker for younger workers (under the age of 25) and for high school dropouts. The earnings effects of higher prose and quantitative scores are significantly associated with the intensity with which workers use their reading, writing, and mathematics skills on the job. Employees who apply such skills daily at work had sharply higher economic returns than those who do not. Raising the productivity and earnings potential of the future workforce will require simultaneous increases in both the demand and supply of literacy proficiencies.

Literacy deficits also seem to be an important barrier to the employability of the poor or near poor who are not active in the labor force. Integrating education programs with job placement, job search training, and job training programs may provide the means for encouraging more disadvantaged citizens to enter the workforce as well as raise the long-term earning potential of future labor force participants.

Finally, there is a need for expanded literacy training of the nation's workers through their workplace. The NALS data indicate that nearly all subgroups of employees, including frontline workers, receive positive economic payoffs from higher literacy proficiencies. Future efforts geared toward improving the quantity and quality of on-the-job literacy training are likely to be important in maintaining and improving the country's labor productivity, real wages, and economic competitiveness.