Christopher Jencks looks at higher education’s problems:
American higher education, once the envy of the world, is losing its competitive edge. Most of the world’s top universities are still located in the United States, but our other great accomplishment, making higher education available to an ever-larger fraction of young people, has succumbed to our hatred of taxes. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, young people in Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and Scandinavia, where students and families do not bear such a large share of college costs, are now all more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than are young people in the United States. That is not because American employers no longer want more college graduates. The pay premium for workers with a bachelor’s has doubled since the mid-1970s and is now greater than the gap in almost any other rich nation. This trend has been one factor (among many) in the rise of economic inequality. Richard Rothstein discusses the many other steps that would be needed to reverse that rise.
What has gone wrong? The problem has three parts. First, the college graduation rate has traditionally grown in tandem with the high school graduation rate — which hasn’t risen since the early 1970s. In addition, while the proportion of high school graduates entering college has risen, the proportion of college entrants earning a four-year degree has fallen. Meanwhile, college costs have soared, and financial aid has not kept up.