Too many variables get in the way of making direct cause-and-effect assessments, but there’s no denying this: America’s economic difficulties have occurred in tandem with its declining status in educational attainment compared to other countries.
Hence President Obama’s 60 Percent Solution. Much like John Kennedy’s moon-mission mandate for the 1960s, Obama has outlined a long-term goal for three out of five adults in the country to have at least a bachelor’s degree by 2025. For the nation as a whole, that’s going to be a tough task: Only about 28 percent of Americans older than 25 now hold at least a bachelor’s degree. More than doubling that educational attainment within a decade is a Herculean task on a national scale.
Missouri and Kansas, though, are better positioned than most states to reach that figure, education professionals and policy-makers say. It wouldn’t be easy, but the payoff would be almost unimaginable.
“That is really setting the mark high,” said Gary Sherrer, a member of the Kansas Board of Regents. “I’d like to think we can, because if we did that, this country would be so strong economically. The correlation between levels of education and the economic strength of a community, a state and a nation are so obvious, so strong, that it’s really a worthwhile goal.”
On multiple fronts, though, each state faces significant challenges if it hopes to raise degree-attainment levels to 60 percent. Among them:
Public funding. While Missouri has done a better job of holding the line on higher-education spending cuts in recent years, lawmakers in Jefferson City say there’s no way to buffer the public university system from fiscal pain in the coming year. Kansas, after also holding fast last year, has still seen more than $100 million cut from higher-education spending since 2008. Like Missouri, it still faces budget shortfalls of nearly $500 million (or more) as the two legislatures for each state reconvene this month to start deliberations on spending.
Demographics. The long-anticipated decline in enrollments of high school graduates has arrived, after those numbers hit their historic peak in 2009. Because student tuition accounts for a historically high percentage of college costs, given the reductions in state aid, lower enrollments portend reduced revenues for universities.
Poor preparation. Even as numbers of students entering college begins to decline, more of those students, in Missouri at least, are arriving on campus unprepared for the academic rigors of college. They need costly remedial courses that drain resources from more fruitful academic pursuits.
Changing value propositions. As degree costs have increased, public attitudes are changing about the value of a college education. For years, a figure touted in higher-education circles has been that, over a lifetime, a bachelor’s degree would generate an additional $1 million in career earnings. A widely distributed analysis by Sandy Baum of Skidmore College in New York state, however, pegs the additional earning power at closer to $300,000. Still nothing to sneeze at, but a difference great enough to leave some questioning whether college is the right course to pursue.
Starting in a hole. With high-school dropout rates of nearly 21 percent in Kansas and nearly 18 percent in Missouri, the region starts out behind in the game. From an average group of 100 ninth-graders, more than three out of four who don’t drop out would have to go on to college, well above today’s levels. The nation as a whole is doing even worse in this regard, with a dropout rate of 25.1 percent for the Class of 2008.
Taken together, such factors help explain why Missouri’s commissioner of higher education, David Russell, says that despite the noble intentions of Obama’s goal, current conditions may make a 60 percent target unattainable.
Menacing Metrics
Russell’s department posts on-line a series of figures that show how close the state comes to that 60 percent threshold. One of the department’s goals is to beat the president’s standard, and to do so by 2020. At that point, it hopes to see 63 percent of degree-seeking students completing their programs within six years.
According to the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System, Missouri’s figure stood at 55 percent in 2009, receding from a five-year high of 57 percent the previous year. The state has helped by increasing need-based aid for students from the poorest families, more than tripling that amount since 2005.
But degree-seeking students are just a small fraction of the potential pool, as Russell notes. The numbers of Missouri high-school graduates enrolling in post-secondary education have fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2008 to 66 percent in 2010. That leaves a lot of ground to make up if its goal of 75 percent is to be attained within a decade.
Compounding that difficulty: The percentage of students who need remedial courses when they start college has gone the wrong direction, too. In 2009, the figure reached 37.3 percent, its highest level in five years. That figure was bolstered by minority students, more than half of whom required remedial courses in each of the past three years.
Russell noted that Missouri was one of six states working with the federal government to identify strategies for getting to 60 percent. Already, his department is framing discussions with public universities about how many additional graduates each would need every year to get Missouri aligned with Obama’s goal.
In Kansas, 54 percent of college freshmen make it to degree completion within six years, a figure not far behind Missouri’s. The bigger issue, and the greater challenge to meeting Obama’s call, is that only eight out of every 100 students who enter ninth grade in each state walk across a stage to pick up a bachelor’s degree. At that rate, a 60 percent goal for degree-holders might as well be 200 percent. If nothing else changes, we can’t get there from here, Russell said.
“We can’t reach the goal if we’re losing that many of our students along the way,” he said. “We believe that a big reason they don’t stay in the system long enough can be traced back to early childhood edu-cation and what we do to position them” for success in college.
Capital Concerns
No discussion about increasing educational attainment can take place without consideration of the costs involved, especially with tax-supported public universities. Federal stimulus dollars gushed into state capitals in 2009 and 2010, but that geyser has played out. What’s left for many states are financing holes that are nearly unprecedented. A recent report by the National Conference of State Legislatures’ showed 15 states with an aggregate operating budget gap of $26 billion this fiscal year—a figure that the conference says will balloon to $82 billion in the coming year, spreading to 35 states.
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