Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation’s dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned on Thursday that the growing gap between the US and other countries threatens to undermine US economic competitiveness.
The US used to lead the world in the number of 25 to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.
“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”
While access to college has been the major concern in recent decades, over the past year, college completion too has become a leading item on the national agenda.
In July last year, US President Barack Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, calling for 5 million more college graduates by 2020, to help the US again lead the world in educational attainment.
This month, on becoming chairman of the National Governors Association, Governor Joe Manchin III of West Virginia announced that he would lead a college-completion initiative.
In May, Grantmakers for Education, an organization for those who make gifts to educational programs, convened a group of philanthropists and policy experts to talk about how to bolster college-completion rates.
“We spend a fortune recruiting freshmen, but forget to recruit sophomores,” Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, said at the meeting.
In April, Melinda Gates gave a speech at the American Association of Community Colleges convention, urging community college officials to lead the way on college completion and pledging that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would contribute up to US$110 million to improve remedial programs in an effort to increase graduation rates.
“The stars are aligning in a way that gives me some hope,” said William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, who hosted the Washington discussion along with Caperton. “This is a problem that’s been around for too long, but now there’s beginning to emerge a focus of attention and activity that quite frankly we haven’t had until now.”
Kirwan said that the US had fallen behind other countries over several decades.
“We led the world in the 1980s, but we didn’t build from there,” he said. “If you look at people 60 and over, about 39 to 40 percent have college degrees, and if you look at young people too, about 39 to 40 percent have college degrees. Meanwhile, other countries have passed us by.”
Canada now leads the world in educational attainment, with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least associate’s degrees in 2007, compared with 40 percent of those in the US.
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