I have never posted a diary before, but I have read DKos religiously for years. Something on the front page that SusanG cited in her mid-day round up really bothered me and it compelled me to follow up on it. Susan G cites a study by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, reported on in a blog at the Washington Monthly in saying that:
"A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents."
But the problem is the original blogger misrepresented what the AASCU report actually found. The report found that:
"While the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of its population aged 35–64 with a college degree, it ranks tenth in the percentage of its population aged 25–34 who have earned an associate or baccalaureate degree."
This means that other countries rate of university attendance is increasing more rapidly than is the US's, not that the rate of college attendance in the US is decreasing. The fact is that the rate of college attendance in the US isn't changing.
In fact, educational researchers have found that:
"Indeed, for any given cohort, there has been virtually no change over the past two decades in the share of youth who have been awarded a postsecondary degree."
(from: The Role of Higher Education in Social Mobility Robert Haveman and Timothy Smeeding, The Future of Children, Vol. 16, No. 2, Opportunity in America (Fall, 2006), pp. 125-150)
Here is a graph showing exactly what the report is arguing:
I agree that it is a problem that higher education in the US is not expanding as rapidly in other countries, but it does NOT mean that today's youth are less educated than their parents.
Moreover, you cannot discuss the difference between 35-64 year olds and 25-34 year olds without talking about demographic shifts the US is going through -- more immigrants who may have started out with very low education levels. It is most likely that their children's education level is greater than their parents but they still do not attend college, bringing down mean college attendance rates.
The real problem behind these numbers is that they just argue that Americans today aren't getting as much education -- but this belies the truth of huge income disparities in higher education attendance in the US, that is something I think this community should care about.
Here are some more statistics that show just how dire the situation is, in terms of class-inequalities in access to higher education:
1.
About 85 percent of eighth-grade students in the United States aspire to a college degree.
But in 2001, only 44 percent of high school graduates from the bottom quintile of the income
distribution were enrolled in college in the October after they graduated from high school, as against almost 80 percent of those in the upper quintile.
2.
Since the 1970s students from lower-income families have increasingly become clustered in public two-year postsecondary institutions, which often turn out to be the end of their formal education
- The fact is that university enrollments are increasing, but completion rates are not. Moreover, the enrollment rates of poorer students are not increasing nearly as fast as are those of poor students. This chart compares high school graduates from 1980 to 1992 -- those who have just now turned 35. The gap between the highest-income and lowest-income students widened the most at the level of 4-year BA granting institutions during that decade.
There is clearly a lot more to say on this topic, including the fact that more and more people are going back to school through online classes, distant learning, etc, over the age of 35 -- something that is impossible to do in many other countries. Moreover, there has been a huge increase in the number of students getting Master's degrees and PhDs, or other advanced degrees. It is very hard to argue that today's young people are less-educated than their parents.
We need to talk about the quality of institutions (which no matter what you think are probably better in the US than any other country at the graduate-degree level, and quite tied to the workforce at the two-year degree level), the difference between attendance and completion and the outrageous costs of attendance that prohibits many poor students from completion, the effects of demographic shifts in the US if we really want to understand this phenomenon.
All quotations from: The Role of Higher Education in Social Mobility Robert Haveman and Timothy Smeeding, The Future of Children, Vol. 16, No. 2, Opportunity in America (Fall, 2006), pp. 125-150) I know that most people don't have access to academic journals, so I apologize about that, but I feel like statistics can be so misrepresented in the media, that it is often best to trust those who have to go through extensive peer review to get anything published for our quantitative analysis.