The Attainment Agenda: State Policy Leadership in Higher Education

Foreword

Foreword Patrick M. Callan The week The Attainment Agenda was completed and sent to the publisher, the Organisation for Economic Co-­ operation and Development (OECD) issued the most recent in its series of reports comparing national education performance. Once again the OECD documented, as it has for most of the past decade, the relatively weak higher education attainment rates of young American adults. The United States ranked twelfth in the proportion of 25-­to 34-­ year-­ olds who have achieved postsecondary degrees and other credentials. In contrast to the pattern in most nations that perform better, younger Americans—the core of the nation’s workforce for the next three to four decades—acquired less education than older workers. This generational gap leaves the United States at a competitive disadvantage in the knowledge-­ based global economy that increasingly requires education and training beyond high school for employment that supports a middle-­ class standard of living and that relentlessly punishes undereducated individuals, communities, states, and nations with diminished economic opportunity and reduced standards of living. It is clear that the United States faces educational opportunity and workforce deficits. If our nation is to be competitive educationally and economically—or to regain international preeminence, as President Barack Obama has advocated—we must improve college participation and attainment under conditions that differ markedly from those of the second half of the twentieth century, when the United States was the global leader. These new circumstances include significant demographic shifts, constrained governmental and private finances, and the opportunities and issues raised by the emergence of digital technologies and online education. The transformation of American higher education required to educate unprecedented numbers of Americans, many from historically unserved and underserved ethnic and economic groups, to higher levels of postsecondary attainment will be profound. The challenge is of at least the magnitude of earlier transformations in the missions and responsibilities of colleges and universities in the late nineteenth and mid-­ twentieth centuries. viii  Foreword Government initiatives have been central to each of these historic transitions, particularly those that extended college opportunity to new and more heterogeneous populations. In these earlier transformations, including the establishment of land-­grant universities in the nineteenth century and research universities and institutions of mass higher education in the decades after World War II, government played a critical role. Effective state and federal policy is no less a necessary condition for the transformation of higher education to serve the needs of American society in the twenty-­ first century. In contrast to most of our international economic and educational competitors , higher education policy in the United States is primarily the responsibility of states, not the national government. In the past, the preeminence of the United States in higher education was attributed in part to the diffusion of authority and responsibility for colleges and universities among fifty states and between public and private institutions. While the federal government has a critical role in supporting student financial assistance and research, the responsibility for assuring college opportunity and for addressing the deficits or gaps in college participation and attainment resides principally with states. These studies of five very different states and the analyses of broader implications offered in this volume bring together two of the core issues of education policy in the second decade of the twenty-­ first century: the performance of higher education, and the effectiveness of state public policy in influencing performance. This study is particularly important because it captures demographic and economic changes that are reshaping expectations of higher education . Pervasive pressures for change have reopened, for the first time in several generations, fundamental issues: who colleges should serve, how many college graduates the nation and the states need, and who should pay for postsecondary education and training. These rich and insightful state studies describe the policy dynamics of five states as they seek to cope—sometimes coming to grips with, sometimes floundering, and sometimes failing to even raise the most crucial issues —with their responsibilities for higher education. The central lesson I take from these cases and the analysis provided by Laura Perna and Joni Finney is that state policy is highly consequential to the performance of colleges and universities in meeting societal needs for individual opportunity and national and state prosperity. State policies that focus governmental and institutional efforts on broad public goals, particularly on improving college readiness of high school graduates and higher rates of participation and attainment in postsecondary education, can stimulate improved results in these [52.14.130.13] Project...