WARREN, Mich. — Estranged from his family at 17, Jake Boyd put himself through Macomb Community College in suburban Detroit by working nearly 100 hours a week: 12 hours a day, six days a week, at a car wash, followed by four-hour shifts as a security guard at an apartment complex.
Homeless for a while, Boyd had to skip a semester when he ran out of money for tuition. It took him almost five years to earn his associate degree in law enforcement from Macomb, the campus where President Obama announced his American Graduation Initiative in 2009, setting a goal of restoring the country to first place by 2020 in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees.
Despite the hurdles in his way, Boyd has resisted the urge to quit on his goal of going on to get a bachelor’s degree this fall, “if I can squeeze some more pennies together,” and ultimately joining the Peace Corps.
Most students like him, however, do give up.
Only one in five of those who enroll in community colleges—and, in some states, barely one in 10—graduates in three years, while only about half of students who go to universities get their bachelor’s degrees within six. That has helped to push the United States from first to 10th in the world in the proportion of the population that has graduated from college, threatening to make this generation of college-age Americans the first to be less well-educated than their parents.
It’s a trend that Obama, in a speech on this campus two years ago this week, promised to reverse. The president’s goal made community colleges—which enroll 43 percent of American students—a linchpin of this strategy, calling on them to increase their graduation rates by 50 percent, or five million more degree-holders, in under a decade.
Yet conversations with dozens of experts and reviews of available data show that obstacles on the road to graduation only have gotten greater in the two years since then. Few believe the 2020 target will be met.
