American Malaise? Lagging College Attainment in the United States

Time was when the United States led the world in the amount of education its young people received and in the proportion that graduated from college. This was the case throughout most of the twentieth century, up until the final decade. However, the OECD Factbook 2009 (2009) identifies nine countries with higher rates of “tertiary attainment” for individuals in the 25–34 age group, and another four essentially equal to the United States at 39 percent. Some cold comfort might be had from noting that the United States improved on this score by 3.5 percent from 1997 to 2006, but the OECD average growth was more than 8 percent. Even critics of such rankings admit that the proportion of young Americans graduating from college has virtually stagnated since the 1970s. But the situation is worse than that. Demographic stagnation has been accompanied by increasing inequality. College completion has decreased for the lowest half of family incomes and increased for the upper half. In fact, rates of college attendance, graduation, and graduation from the selective institutions that promise the best career opportunities have all increased for the highest income groups but decreased for the lowest. These trends ought to disturb anyone concerned with the global competitiveness of the American workforce or the well being of our polity and society. These problems have scarcely been ignored during the decades in which they were gestating, but only in recent years has growing recognition evolved into