Study Calls for Critical Boost in U.S. Degree Attainment Levels

The U.S. needs to increase the number of people receiving a bachelor’s or associate degree by 37 percent over current attainment levels if it desires to have 55 percent of the adult population with a college degree by the year 2025, Jobs for the Future reports. In Hitting Home: Quality, Cost, and Access Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today, the nonprofit organization predicts 55 percent will be the level of degree attainment for some of the top performing OECD countries in 2025. To remain competitive, the U.S. must use this figure as a target.

 

By utilizing reports from a variety of sources, the study illustrates the increasing demand for a highly educated workforce in the future, and how other countries around the world are rapidly increasing the segment of their populations who are obtaining associate and bachelor degrees. In 2005, this percentage in America was 37.4 percent, ranking the U.S. eighth behind Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Japan, Norway, South Korea and Sweden (OECD, Education at a Glance 2006). Even though comparing countries may be difficult because of differences between countries’ demographics and differences between countries’ education systems, the U.S. may continue to experience difficulties in raising levels of degree attainment because of the rising costs of education, especially when indexed to inflation. Hitting Home uses fluctuating demographic trends between racial categories, each have varying degree attainment levels, to comment future growth will be more difficult unless these attainment levels change.

 

The study contends that state policymakers and education officials need to fix the problems of access, quality and productivity in higher education. It provides the flowing recommendations:

• Align curriculum requirements between educational institutions to minimize repeat course-taking;
• Increase productivity by concentrating on core academic areas and reallocate funds from inefficient academic areas;
• Streamline the transition of students from high school to college;
• Promote timely degree completion, perhaps with incentives; and,
• Redesign programs to improve results while reducing costs.

Some efforts to reach these goals by individual states are further explained in the study. For example, Florida enables most graduates of community colleges within the state to automatically meet all general education requirements and guarantees admission at the junior level for these graduates at universities in the state. In California, the 11th grade standards test provides students an early glimpse at their preparedness for university instruction. New York’s Bundy Aid program provides rewards to private institutions that graduate residents from the state of New York. Finally, a pilot study by the National Center for Academic Transformation found that incorporating technology and utilizing professors as tutors, rather than lecturers, reduced cost and increased learning outcomes.

 

Hitting Home is part of a multiyear initiative funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education called the Making Opportunity Affordable project. The study is available at:

http://www.jff.org/download.php?file=HittingHome.pdf&KC_PubID=335



Links to the study and more than 4,500 additional TBED-related research reports, strategic plans and other papers also can be found at the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Resource Center, jointly developed by the Technology Administration and SSTI, at http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org/.