Tag: College dropouts

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Will Bachelor’s Degree Attainment Rates Keep Rising?

In 1950, 34.3 percent of American adults had a high school diploma or higher. Over the next 30 years, that percentage would double.

Today, about the same percentage of adults (34.2 percent) have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Will that percentage double over the next 30 years?

That may seem like a crazy question. College is different than high school, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we’ve decided to draw an arbitrary line at 12th grade. After that point, we expect individuals to pay for some or all of their education costs. That arbitrary distinction may be changing, albeit slowly.

But so far at least, high school and college attainment rates are following nearly the same path. The change in the high school attainment rate in the first half of the 1900s looks nearly identical to where we are today in terms of college attainment.

On a grand scale, the high school attainment rate looks like a pretty standard S-curve. After relatively modest gains in the 1910s and 1920s, growth rates started to accelerate in the 1970s and 80s before inevitably slowing down a bit since then:

If you look at only the left half of the high school attainment graph, that’s pretty much where we are in terms of bachelor’s degree attainment. Just like the early years for high school attainment, the growth in bachelor’s degree attainment was pretty slow for a long time but has picked up in recent decades. The data only go through 2017 so far, but in terms of college attainment gains, the 2010s are on track to be the best decade on record:

In fact, the early stages of the high school and college attainment trends look extremely similar. They’re just a couple generations apart. To show what this looks like, I overlaid the high school attainment rate from 1910-1960 versus the college attainment rate from 1975 to today, and the graph below is the result. The two have a correlation of 0.96, and the college attainment results (the red dots) are tightly hugging the blue trend line representing the change in high school attainment from a couple generations prior. 

As I wrote in 2015, the key question is what happens next. Do the college attainment rates stay on the linear trend they have been on, or do they start to look more like the S-curve path that high school attainment eventually followed?

There are a lot of factors that will answer that question. Mortality and immigration matter here, of course, but so do education policies. In the last half of the twentieth century, we created things like compulsory attendance laws, the GED, and the GI Bill to accelerate our attainment rates, to name just a few contributors. At the high school level, we got better at tracking enrollment and completion rates, and we eventually started holding high schools accountable for graduating their students.

All of these efforts are further behind at the higher education level. It’s an open question whether we’ll make the equivalent policy adjustments in higher education as we did in K-12, but the answers to that challenge matter both to the individuals graduating today and to our broader society going forward.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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College Dropouts Outnumber K-12 Dropouts

Four years ago, I wrote about an eye-opening statistic: More American adults have dropped out of college than out of K-12 education. I recently updated the data, and the long-term trends are continuing:

In pure, raw numbers, college dropouts are now a bigger problem than high school dropouts*. As of 2017, there were almost 31 million college dropouts compared to 22.5 million Americans with less than a high school diploma. Over the last decade, the number of K-12 dropouts has fallen by over 5 million people, while the number of college dropouts has risen by nearly 3 million. As I predicted, this divergence will only accelerate as older generations with lower educational attainment rates are gradually replaced by new generations with higher attainment rates.

Last year I wrote about how this trend should shape the future work of education reformers. My conclusion at the time still stands:

We’ve had some success in boosting low-level basic skills and getting more students through K-12 education, but we need a different set of policy solutions, and a broader perspective, if we’re going to carry that progress through to higher-level skills and higher college completion rates. Finding those answers will matter both to the individuals in our education systems today and to our broader society going forward.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

*Note: “K-12 dropouts” here includes all Americans over age 25 who have less than a GED or high school diploma. “College dropouts” takes all Americans over age 25 who list “some college, no degree” as their highest level of educational attainment and subtracts out anyone over age 25 still enrolled in higher education seeking their first postsecondary credential or degree. 

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Latest Edu-reads

Today is the 84th anniversary of the Social Security Act. Most people don’t know that the original Act excluded state and local government workers, and it was only later that states were allowed to opt in. Even today, there are still 15 states plus the District of Columbia that do not provide teachers with Social Security coverage. That has implications and consequences for about 1.2 million teachers, not to mention their spouses and children and the plan itself. Read more here.

How can we reconfigure schools and re-design teacher staffing roles to “extend the reach” of great teachers? That’s the subject of my new interview with Stephanie Dean. We talk about her work at Opportunity Culture and how they are working with school districts to identify multi-classroom teacher leaders, build teacher leadership capacity, and ensure more students have access to great teaching. They’re up to 25 districts in 9 states, growing rapidly, and showing some positive results. Read it here.

For Chalkbeat, Matt Barnum writes about four new studies all finding evidence that more money boosts educational outcomes, particularly for low-income students.

“Mortality rates in comparable rich countries have continued their pre-millennial fall at the rates that used to characterize the US. In contrast to the US, mortality rates in Europe are falling for those with low levels of educational attainment, and are doing so more rapidly than mortality rates for those with higher levels of education.” That is from an older Brookings piece (from 2017), but it was new to me. The graphs starting on page 45 are especially interesting.

As I’ve noted before, there are more Americans who have dropped out of college than who have dropped out of high school. David Kirp talks about his new book, The College Dropout Scandal, and what we can do about it, with Scott Jaschik.

Elizabeth Warren as a teacher.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Weekend Edu-Reads

“…any movement serious about improving education for low-income, rural, and minority students has to look outside of cities — especially in the South, where a majority of students live outside of city centers.” That’s Kelly Robson about the need for philanthropies to invest beyond urban areas.

“…the children of Perry Preschool participants — most of whom are now in their mid-20s — were less likely to be suspended from school, more likely to complete high school, and more likely to be employed full-time with some college experience. Children of participants were also more likely to be employed and to not be involved with the criminal justice system.” Read Marnie Kaplan on the latest research on the Perry Preschool project, which suggests the program had inter-generational effects.

California has been requiring prospective teachers to take a reading test with “no evidence that it contributes to more effective instruction.” Oh, and this same test is disproportionately keeping out black and Hispanic teachers. I suppose it’s good the state is considering dropping it now, but why did California start using this test in the first place?

“There is usually more variation in earnings results between programs within colleges than between colleges.” That’s Kevin Carey on what we can learn and do with program-level outcome data.

David Leonhardt and Sunil Choy partnered with the Urban Institute on this cool data visualization project on college dropouts.

The Pension Pac-Man must be fed.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman