The School of Hard Shocks Page 2

ON THE AGENDA

Will a Delay on the Climate Treaty be Time Well-Spent?

Scott Bittle
Nov 16, 2009

World leaders flatly admitted this weekend what everyone pretty much knew: there won't be a major deal on climate change at the big conference in Copenhagen next month. Instead, leaders will try to keep the process going, in hopes of coming up with a deal next year.

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Listening To Young Americans On The Deficit

Francie Grace
Nov 13, 2009

You wouldn't think the bottom line on the $1.6 trillion federal budget deficit and $11.9 trillion national debt crisis could be summed up in a single sentence, but when the right words whizzed by, the Wall Street Journal's David Wessel was quick to point them out.

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FACING UP TO THE
Nation's Finances

National Debt Clock

The School of Hard Shocks Page 2

Panelist Paul Lingenfelter expressed his belief that the underlying integrity of the country's educational system can ultimately make the U.S. second to no other nation. Pursuing the goal set out by the Obama administration that everyone should graduate from high school, said Lingenfelter, as the goal of everyone having access to some form of a post-secondary education should be a "top national priority."

Post-secondary education, said Lingenfelter, is important because U.S. workers need to be able to compete in the global marketplace and because this education is what the students themselves want. Referring to a study by the U.S. Department of Education, Lingenfelter noted that 72 percent of high school sophomores say they aspire to a baccalaureate degree and a further 36 percent say that's not enough, aspiring to either a graduate or a professional degree.

The aspirations of the students, he noted, line up with economic reality: according to at least one estimate by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, by the year 2018, 63 percent of all jobs in the U.S. will require some post-secondary education training. "Maybe the verb require isn't absolutely true, but the fact is that that's what's happening in our economy, and if there's any validity at all to employment rate and to pay, maybe there is some value to this higher level of education attainment." Furthermore, the rate of unemployment is lower for better educated people and, whereas real wages for high school graduates have remained stagnant in the last 25 years, for baccalaureate recipients, they have increased 20 percent.

According to data from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), while Americans ages 45 to 54 remain one of the best-educated groups in the world, the U.S. is lagging behind other OECD nations in educating young adults. "The most powerful and troubling aspect in educational attainment in the United States," said Lingenfelter, is the "high correlation [of educational attainment] with socioeconomic status." Students in the bottom quarter of socioeconomic status are far less likely to attend college than those in the highest quarter, even when academic achievement is high, meaning an "enormous amount of human potential… is being under-utilized."

So how do we harness this potential? Panel members had differing opinions. Lingenfelter emphasized working within the current system to increase participation and graduation rates among current students and adults already in the workforce. Lerman and Kolb endorsed efforts to provide better, useful and rewarding alternatives to the traditional college experience.

The background of rapid economic and technological changes, combined with globalization and changes in cost and financing of college leads to a situation, said Kolb, in which the idea of college needs to be radically rethought. "We tend to think of college now as a place," noted Kolb, "that has to change... I'd like to suggest that we think of college as a process where learning should happen, and then to think about the transmission of learning and how learning happens and how learning has changed."

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