He had been forced to read so many books in college, he told his companion, that he vowed never to pick up another book after he graduated.

Before you write the guy off as a refugee from the current gross-out movie "Jackass Number Two," you should consider a new national study of American colleges.

In a finding that is hard to believe, the study said only 31 percent of college-educated Americans qualify as "prose literate," meaning they can comprehend something as simple as a newspaper story. That is down from 40 percent a decade ago.

This might help explain why a major source of news for young adults is "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Comedy Central.

"The results of the literacy survey were very poor and declining," says Charles Miller, a Houston investment manager and a buddy of President Bush who headed a committee examining higher education. "We shouldn't be proud as a country to say what we are doing with the college graduates. The bottom line is we have had a decline in the quality of outcome. We can't ignore it."

Miller was at a breakfast at the N.C. Museum of Art last week to help start a national dialogue about improving higher education.

He was brought to Raleigh by Jim Hunt, the four-term former North Carolina governor, who served on the committee with Miller. Hunt is making higher education reform the topic of the Emerging Issues Forum that will be held in February at N.C. State University.

In August, the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the committee on which Miller and Hunt served, concluded that "the quality of student learning -- as measured by assessments of college graduates -- is declining."

The commission warned of "disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates." It concluded, "Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined."

This is scary news for places such as the Triangle, which, with all its universities and research facilities, is heavily invested in the knowledge business.

The commission wants colleges to begin the kind of standardized testing we have in secondary and elementary schools so there is some quality control on what Susie learned during her four, uh, five years in college.

Miller says there are many fine things about American higher education. But he says it has become a "risk averse," maturing industry that doesn't reward innovation, has a dysfunctional system of financing and lacks accountability.

Erskine Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system, says he doesn't need to be convinced. He says the system is working to implement many of the reforms suggested in the report, including student testing of freshmen and seniors.

"Believe you me," Bowles says, "we get it."

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