A senior German academic has joined the chorus of voices expressing concern over the low educational standards of newly arriving migrants, and the significant knock-on effects that is bound to have on the German educational system. President of the University of Hamburg and chairman of the German Educational Action Council Dieter Lenzen has pointed to the enormous cost of teaching hundreds of thousands of newcomers basic language skills, pointing in particular to the Syrian community. While the proportion of Syrians arriving and claiming to have university degrees — around 15 per cent — isn’t much below the German population as a whole, the vast majority of the remaining 85 per cent are in a significantly worse state, unable even to perform basic tasks like reading a bus timetable. Outlining the scale of the challenge and the lack of ability of most Syrians arriving in Europe, President Lenzen said: “the problem is the 65 per cent of an age group that can operate only on reading comprehension level one by the PISA test”, reports N24. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test is a standard form of measuring intellectual ability and at level one suggests that the majority of Syrian “refugees” are unable to complete “basic