The United States has fallen to No. 14 globally in the annual tally of newly degreed, four-year college graduates.
The bulk of community college students do not actually earn an associate degree.
Polls suggest that 75 percent of Americans believe a college education increasingly dictates who thrives in the modern workplace. The same proportion of people is frightened by unrelenting spikes in college costs.
Those were among a litany of troublespots highlighted at last week’s Summit on Higher Education, where a presumed path forward also was laid out by, among others, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
“This cannot be addressed piecemeal or by the federal government alone,” said Duncan, a keynote speaker at the New York City confab, hosted by Time magazine. “In many ways, the American system of higher education is still the envy of the world … (But) it must get dramatically better.”
Improvements, Duncan added, are essential in three key areas: Containing what he describes as exorbitant college costs without diminishing the quality of education. Increasing the count of college students who also actually earn a degree—and earn it on time—and placing limits on how long a student can get government aid. Education funding—from both the public and private sectors—would be based on student performance and other outcomes.
Any path forward, more and more, will require the help of businesses whose own futures rest on their capacity to hire workers with intellectual, technical, vocational and other skills matching the available jobs, Duncan told attendees at the conference, co-sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
