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1. Increasing Higher Education Attainment in the United States: Challenges and Opportunities
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter one Increasing Higher Education Attainment in the United States Challenges and Opportunities arthur m. hauptman Over the past decade, the traditional policy focus on increasing access to higher education has been supplemented with much greater attention to improving the chances that students complete their degree— the completion rate. Even more heartening, debates in the United States and many other countries now place heightened emphasis on increasing the proportion of adult workers with a degree—the attainment rate. This overview examines issues arising from this shift in policy and pays particular attention to the challenge of increasing degree attainment in the United States by • describing three measures of higher education—participation, completion , and attainment—and how the United States stacks up against other industrialized countries on these measures; • tracing the evolution of the goals that have been set forth by President Obama and others for improving degree completion and attainment rates; • considering whether the president’s attainment goal is realistic and how effective any increases in attainment are likely to be in meeting projected labor force needs; and • suggesting eight rules for the road to increase degree attainment in the future. Examining the Relationship: Participation, Completion, and Attainment A natural place to start the process of understanding recent debates is to recognize the interconnection between and the differences in the three 17 18 the challenges key indicators that define the scope and performance of any higher education system—participation, completion, and attainment—defined as follows: 1. Participation rate is the percentage of a population who enroll in higher education. 2. Completion rate is the percentage of entering students who earn a degree. 3. Attainment rate is the percentage of the working population who earn a degree. Examining the Higher Education Attainment Pipeline While the three rates differ from each other in important ways, higher education attainment rates may be best understood as a pipeline in which these measures relate to each other in a specific way, as indicated in figure 1.1 and the equation below: High school attainment ⫻ Higher education participation ⫻ Higher education completion ⫽ Higher education attainment Figure 1.1 underscores the fact that society can increase higher education attainment at three junctures on the pipeline: 1. by increasing the number of high school graduates, preferably those who are ready to do college-level work; 2. by increasing the number of students who enroll in college, in the belief that enough of these students will complete their education to lift attainment rates; and 3. by improving the rate at which entering students complete their education. The figure also summarizes where the United States stands among OECD countries on these different pipeline measures. High school attainment rates are the culmination of elementary and secondary education and thus represent the first leg of the higher education attainment pipeline. With its long commitment to compulsory education, the United States ranks at or near the top in terms of high school attainment rates among OECD countries. This contrasts with high school graduation rates, where the United States does not rank as high among members of the OECD. That a large number of Americans [44.200.182.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:23 GMT) Increasing Higher Education Attainment 19 earn their high school degrees or the equivalent (such as the GED) later in life may help explain why we rank higher on high school attainment among OECD countries than on high school graduation. Participation rates are the most traditional way of measuring the scope of a higher education system. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has transformed itself from an elite to a mass system and then to a universal system of higher education.1 In the United States we tend to measure participation as the share of high school graduates who enroll in college within the next year, in part because reliable trend data exist for this rate. It stood at 45 percent in 1960 after the first two waves of the GI Bill and grew to 50 percent in 1965, when the Higher Education Act (HEA) was enacted. By 1990 the rate was 60 percent, and it recently reached 70 percent.2 Even though many OECD countries have since become mass or universal systems, the United States still has one of the highest participation rates.3 The high U.S. participation rates also are a function of the size of the country’s community colleges. If these two-year schools were not...