Smarter world threatens to pass us by
In the decades following the Second World War, the Unites States was among world leaders in the percentage of adults with a higher education degree. The GI bill underwrote the brain power that spurred America’s innovation.
But particularly in the last decade, other nations have caught up and surpassed us. America now ranks 12th with those between the ages of 25 and 34 with a two- or four-year degree, behind Canada, Korea Russia, Japan, Australia, Israel and others. And that’s not even mentioning the decline in Americans pursuing degrees in science, math and engineering.
In all, 41.6 percent of Americans in that key age bracket hold at least an associate’s degree. And with just 31.6 percent of Californians 25 to 34 years old in that category, the state ranks only 28th iin the nation, according to new data published by the College Board. And the state ranks low in other measures of educational attainment.
To make America the leader once again in educational prowess and skills in a competitive world, the College Board’s Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education is urging that states and the federal government pursue a goal of having 55 percent of young adults obtain a two- or four-year degree by 2025 – and then adopt policies to make that goal possible.
While ambitious, it would merely match the level of educational attainment that Canada, Japan and some other highly developed nations expect to reach by then, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers.
In its new report, The College Completion Agenda, the Commission makes 10 recommendations to improve college enrollment and degree attainment. It also looks at states’ progress in meeting them.
- Make preschool universally available for families below 200 percent of poverty.
- Provide, at a minimum, one high school guidance counselor for every 250 students, about one-half of the current national ratio.
- Adopt dropout prevention programs to raise high school graduation; currently only 73.4 percent of entering ninth graders will get a high school degree.
- Align high school standards with international standards (a goal of the common-core initiative) and with college expectations.
- Improve K-12 teacher recruitment and retention, especially among minorities; currently 30 percent of new teachers leave the profession within three years.
- Clarify and simplify the college admission process.
- Provide more need-based financial aid and simplify applications.
- Keep college affordable (state support dropped 3 percent nationally last year even as family income dropped 3.7 percent after adjusting for inflation. California raised tuition to UC schools by a third over two years).
- Dramatically increase college graduation rates by easing transfer processes from community colleges and reducing college dropouts. As of 2007, only 27.8 percent of those who entered 2-year school with the intent of getting an associate’s degree obtained one within three years; only 56 percent of those who entered 4-year college got a bachelor’s degree within six years.
- Encourage adults to return to school for a degree by offering credit for prior learning, as is done in Ohio, and create clear pathways for adult students to achieve a degree.
The Commission included analyses of each of the 10 goals and highlights states with model programs. It also includes data on each state. California is lagging behind in several key indexes. It ranks nearly last in ratio of high school students to guidance counselors: 809 to 1 (and falling), and 41st in high school graduation rate, at 69.1 percent. However, its community college tuition is the lowest among the states, and it has above average number of high school students taking advance placement courses.
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I have a question about the rates of adults between 25 and 34 with college degrees: Does that account for immigration of lower-educated adults? How much of a factor is that and how does it compare to those other nations? … Regarding improving teacher recruitment and retention, wouldn’t stopping the attacks, bashing, blaming and shaming of teachers — and reining in the calls for tying their pay to test scores, slashing their pensions and such, do just a tiny little bit of good there? … Regarding clarifying and simplifying the college admission process, that’s rich coming from the College Board, which is the primary guilty party in making college admissions intensely competitive, complex and stressful.
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Please explain the first bullet “…for families below 200 percent of poverty.”
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Hi Bonnie — only because I’ve worked on school food issues — an area that uses the same jargon — I can give you the concept, though not the numbers: It means families whose income is 200% of the income that’s the official federal designated poverty level. That concept recognizes that the official federal poverty level is very low and that families well above it are struggling economically.
… Hmm, you’d think the College Board would be well-educated enough not to use incomprehensible jargon, wouldn’t you?
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CarolineSF- You hit on one of California’s huge challenges. As long as we have a stream of immigrants supporting our agricultural economy (and home-building and restaurants), we are going to have lower achievement rates than states with fewer immigrants. In particular, the number of young Latino men that come in their late teens or early twenties make the participation rates look particularly bad. But, as a state, we could do a much better job than we are currently doing.
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It is of little surprise to me that our country is falling behind the rest of the world. Look at what we have to deal with to attempt to educate our children in today’s world. As an educator for the last 20+ years, I have seen all levels of the California public education system. I started at the bottom and worked my way up. As upper management I can honestly say the system as it stands right now is broken, almost beyond help, specially here in California. The system functions at the edge of productivity, and could collapse on itself at anytime. The dire economic situation the state is in is shining light on how broken, inefficient, and ineffective the CA public school system is.
My wife is a former teacher who now works in the HR sector for corporate America. She REGULARLY encounters applications where local high school graduates cannot write in coherent, complete sentences. She also regularly dismisses employees that don’t have the math or communication skills to function as productive members of her company.
I chalk this crisis up to four main areas.
TENURE: There are too many bad teachers in the CA school system being protected by tenure. Tenure is supposed to protect GOOD teachers, not bad ones. Until the system makes it easier for a district to remove underperforming teachers, we will continue to see this problem worsen.
UNIONS: The teachers and classified unions regularly protect employees that would have been terminated from the private sector. In my travels from district to district over the years I’ve seen people on drugs, sleeping on the job, refusing to do their job, etc.; who have kept their jobs because their union got involved. Just like tenure, union protectionism is out of control. Unions were created to protect GOOD employees, not the screw-ups.
DISCIPLINE: There is no true discipline anywhere in the CA school system anymore. Students rule the schools, and the districts cower in fear of the looming threat of lawsuits. This discipline problem extends to staff also. My wife left teaching because of the abuse (physical, sexual, and verbal) she received from students and even fellow teachers & staff. Students can get away with anything, and staff will wrap themselves in a union cape to protect themselves. Over the years I’ve seen and heard of numerous teachers caught stealing from other staff or teachers with very little punitive actions for their conduct. Others don’t actually “teach” anymore. They show movies or ignore the kids, so the kids ignore them. Then they enter some fake grades, and call it good. YES, this DOES happen, I’ve seen it in person.
ILLEGALS: Why do I have to pay for a criminal’s (yes, illegal immigration is a CRIME) kid to go to school, just because they broke our nation’s laws? The CA school system would be solvent inside of 5 years if we’d just stop educating the children of people that cannot follow the laws of our country.
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Thanks for answering one another regarding impact of immigration on percentage of adults with degrees and definition of poverty. My fault for repeating bad verbiage. As for “bashing” teachers, Caroline, you are a broken record. A pay system and an evaluation process that treat teachers as professionals and offer extra compensation to teachers in high demand subjects would be one recruitment and retention tool, especially for those debating whether to enter the field.
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I’m tenacious about speaking out against policies and mindsets that I believe could do terrible harm to our children and our educational system. If that’s being “a broken record,” I embrace it. I’ve been called worse! … I’m not anti-immigrant and don’t share the attitudes expressed by some posters here; my question wasn’t an attack on immigrants. But more to the point, you’re wrong, John — they DIDN’T answer my question, which is a factual question about the methodology and findings of the report under discussion. Scott Lay indicates that my question has validity and that immigrants are a potentially huge confounding factor, but to what extent? Is the entire drop in college graduations due to immigration? In that case, the entire basis of your post is erroneous, John. Furthermore, your post doesn’t actually tell us that there was a drop in the percentage of Americans graduating from college. It says that previously, the U.S. was among world leaders, but now the U.S. ranks 12th. Those two pieces of information are not parallel, and since we’re talking about high standards here, I don’t think we should accept this incomplete information, which may or may not be misleading. Because of this paragraphless format, I’ll list the relevant questions on the next take.
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1. John’s post says: “America now ranks 12th with those between the ages of 25 and 34 with a two- or four-year degree, behind Canada, Korea Russia, Japan, Australia, Israel and others.” Where did America previously rank?
2. What are the statistics on how many of those between the ages of 25 and 34 are immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after school age; how do those statistics compare to those of other countries; and how do they affect the No. 12 ranking? (Note that many well-educated immigrants arrive in this country too, so it could be that immigrants improve the picture, for all I know. But we need to know that or this study is meaningless.)
3. You say: “And that’s not even mentioning the decline in Americans pursuing degrees in science, math and engineering.” What are the figures, currently and previously?
4. You say: “In all, 41.6 percent of Americans in that key age bracket hold at least an associate’s degree.” Compared to what percentage previously? And again, how do immigrants affect this statistic?
5. The post says: “…with just 31.6 percent of Californians 25 to 34 years old in that category, the state ranks only 28th in the nation …” Compared to what percentage and what ranking previously, and again, how do immigrants affect this statistic?
Without this information, the implication of this entire post that America is slipping on these measures is not supported. It COULD be that the information is there in the full report and just not included in this post, but that’s not clear.
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I looked at the report, and I don’t see any of those qualifiers addressed in it. Furthermore, there’s another MAJOR confounding factor — the cost of college. In an unknown number of nations, students pay no college tuition. I don’t know which nations those are (it’s true in the Netherlands, immigrant friends tell me). Those of us who are or have recently been parents of college students know that the cost of college is huge, sometimes crushing, in this country. Why is this report getting any attention at all with such fatal holes in it? Information about college graduation rates would be useful if it were complete, but this is so full of holes that it’s utterly invalid.
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The Public Policy Institute of California has written about the same degree shortage in California and come up with similar data. And actually, Caroline, you have it backward: Immigration has not been the statistical problem, it’s been the labor solution in California. As PPIC economist Hans Johnson noted, “The population of immigrants with college degrees has grown almost thirty-fold since 1960, and foreign-born residents now make up 31 percent of all California’s college graduates ages 25 to 64. Recent immigrants are also among the best educated ever to arrive in California: One-third of those who came between 2000 and 2005 had college degrees. While these immigration trends could continue, they’re unlikely to accelerate significantly.” Plenty of CEOs in Silicon Valley (sorry, you can trust me or not — not citation) believe that post-911 immigration policies and the relocation offshore of research and manufacturing operations will lead to fewer immigrants coming here for degrees or staying here after they graduate. This link will take you to the full report. But beside PhDs, there will be a sharp need for graduates for jobs in the middle — demanding technical skills and associate’s degrees or at least some post-secondary education.
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Just happened to be reading a Century of Difference by Fischer and Hout. They have a short chapter on how the rates of education changed in the 20th century. That chapter contains graphs showing graduation rates for both high school and college. The rates became stable around 1970. They mention that the fastest growing educational cohort since 1970 is the group of people who get some college but don’t graduate. So helping these people would seem to be the the fastest way to improve college graduation rates. It seems that a number of the suggestions listed might work well for that group of people. Of course just focusing on amounts we’re temporarily ignoring the quality and usefulness of education received and assuming that having a population with more college graduates is desirable.
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I see most people responding to this article using the word “Immigrant” but failing to use the word “ILLEGAL” before it. The education of illegal immigrants, and their children, costs us million to billions more than these law breakers ever give back to our economy.
John,you state that more immigrants that ever have college educations, this may be true for LEGAL immigrants, but doesn’t hold water for the multitude of ILLEGAL immigrants coming across the borders.
I’m not a racist, or an immigrant hater, but I am someone that obeys the law. People cannot and should not profit from breaking the rules. If some one comes here legally, I will welcome them like a bother or sister. If they sneak in to our country, they do not deserve to profit from it.
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But you’re still missing my point about the immigrant question, John. The point is that without removing (from the data) the adults who arrived in this country after the age of K-12 education, the conclusion may not tell us anything about the U.S. educational system. I get it that there are lots of highly educated immigrants arriving in this country, as well as lots of immigrants with limited education — but without information on how many there are in each category, or without removing the immigrants (who arrive post K-12 education age) from the data, the study is fatally compromised. And, again, there are numerous other confounding factors that make it unsound and invalid to make these comparisons at all — such as the cost of college (a major life-altering expense in the U.S. vs. free in some other countries) and more. I ended up blogging about it and now plan to track down the College Board’s flacks and send them a list of questions. Journalistic convention would be to ask the questions first, but then journalistic convention is also (ironically) to parrot the study without asking ANY questions, or noticing that there are any to ask — journalistic convention is a little weird and self-contradictory. Anyway, here’s my blog post, titled “D’oh! College Board report shows apples inferior to oranges”: http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2010/07/grannan-doh-college-board-report-shows.html
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Please share whatever you find.
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Regarding less-educated immigrants in context of this discussion, Mike Cannon, questions of whether they’re illegal or legal, beneficial or harmful to the fabric of the state, brown-skinned or blond are irrelevant to this particular issue. I’m ONLY talking about their impact on the statistics,period.
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Have acquired a PR e-mail for the College Board, called to confirm that they’re willing to address my questions, compiled a list of questions and sent the questions.
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