Recently in the learning lab at my community college, I worked with a sweet-faced, soft-spoken young man who'd sought the lab's assistance for grammar homework in his basic English class. After struggling together to identify some elusive parts of speech, we decided to simply read the sentences in his exercise book.

It fast became apparent that before he could identify verbs, my student would have to learn to read. Twice, with assistance, he sounded out the syllables in "puppy" – the character of a puppy figured large in this particular workbook – so I had high hopes that word recognition would prevail in subsequent readings. It did not.

This young man is classified, by my school and by the state of California, as a college student.

In my transfer-level literature and advanced composition classes, I have the enviable treat of "instructing" students graced with more brain power and literary ability than their teacher. They write spellbinding analyses of our complex readings. They offer stellar insights into the human condition. They are wise beyond their years, gifted by the gods with an innate ability to reason in the abstract realm.

Many of these academically talented students will never transfer to a four-year institution.

Because their educational journeys will not culminate in a four-year degree, these skilled readers and writers will be classified, by my school and the state of California, as failures.

When our president speaks of the value of education, when he exhorts K-12 students to attend to their studies, teachers the length of California swoon in appreciation. But when President Barack Obama pledges to raise the U.S. college graduate rates, this teacher winces.

In an age when neither a high school nor a college diploma certifies the ability to read and write with the proficiency required to function as a citizen and a consumer, I wish Obama were promising to raise literacy rates. Because literacy signifies a whole lot more than diplomas do.

California needs to cease castigating itself for its inability to send every high school graduate to college. Instead, we should be vowing to make citizen literacy an entitlement achieved by all. We need to dump the moth-eaten myth that college completion is the highest goal of education. That premise, emphasized by our president and dramatized by recent budget cuts to higher education in our state, is a fiction.

In a 2005 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, the findings were grim: Only 31 percent of college graduates were classified as proficient in reading and understanding short texts.

Teaching students to read and write – at any level – is not shameful. Encouraging students to set their sights on graduating from college when they cannot yet read and write is.

In this era of educational budget cuts at every level of instruction, we need to redefine our priorities. The chances are great that my student who cannot recognize the word "puppy" will drop out of college and that the existing programs that might teach him to read will disappear. Imagining his life, conducted without the literacy skills required to apply for a job, to comprehend a financial contract or to vote for a president is heart-rending.

Students who can read and write – whether or not the circumstances of their lives enable them to earn the gilt-edged diplomas by which society wants to measure them – will be forever empowered by their literacy. They will not sign mortgage contracts with impossible terms; they will not fall prey to bogus advertising for sham products.

Perhaps today, when our education budgets are in shambles and our priorities are being recalibrated, we might cease repeating our monotone mantra about the ultimate value of a college diploma. Maybe we should lower our sights.

Maybe we should simply insist that every young adult can, at the very least, identify the word "puppy" – and then fund the programs, from kindergarten through college, that would ensure it.

Anna Tuttle Villegas is a writer and teacher. She lives in Lodi.