The percentage of American working adults with a college degree ticked up from 38.3 percent in 2010 to 38.7 percent in 2011, the Lumina Foundation reported on Thursday, underlining the difficulty of reaching the group’s lofty goals for improving college attainment.
The current pace, which has seen the college-attainment rate grow by less than a percentage point over the previous four years, would leave the country well short of Lumina’s goal of catapulting the proportion of the American population with at least an associate degree to 60 percent by 2025.
“Incremental progress is good but not good enough,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, Lumina’s president. “Given the slow pace of attainment, we’ll have a difficulty meeting the talent needs of the country.”
The 60-percent benchmark is in line with President Obama’s college-attainment goal, set four years ago, to attain the “world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020" in order to fill the number of jobs projected to require one.
The current economic picture has created even more urgency, as the country has added two million jobs requiring at least a bachelor’s degree since the recession.
In its annual report, “A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education,” the foundation issued short-term targets for college attainment by 2016, like raising the number of associate and bachelor’s degrees issued each year, from 2.5 million to three million, and increasing the percentage of Americans who think higher education is necessary from 43 percent to 55 percent.
Lumina, one of the country’s largest foundations focused on higher education, also announced that it had shifted gears in its approach. The foundation will aim more of its $300-million in investments in metropolitan regions toward partnerships between businesses and colleges, as well as between elementary and secondary schools and universities.
Mr. Merisotis cited recent successes in Memphis and Louisville, Ky., as the kind of work it would like to help replicate. He added that the group would also focus on some of the lowest-college-attaining cities in the country, including Lancaster, Pa., and Fresno, Calif.
He said the foundation would announce specific investments in the next few months, focusing on 75 American cities in which to spur collaborative efforts between governments, businesses, and educational institutions by 2016.
“We are now embarking this year on an effort to get a lot more of these metropolitan regions and cities to focus on these efforts,” Mr. Merisotis said. “The lower-attainment communities are in our sights.”
For example, last year Lumina put $11.5-million into 13 cities, including Miami and Phoenix, to provide technical support and evaluation for Latinos entering college.
The foundation will also look to halt a growing education gap among minority groups, as the attainment rate for young African-Americans is 24.7 percent and only 27.1 percent of working-age blacks have college degrees over all. For Hispanics, that gap is also widening, as 19.3 percent have college credentials over all, but only 17.9 percent of young Hispanics do.
The report highlighted the imbalance that has taken hold in the country, as 59.1 percent of Asians have a degree, as do 43.3 percent of whites.
Lumina has also pushed to overhaul time-based credentials like the credit hour with improved competency-based measures, especially because the desired 23 million more degree holders would swell the current higher-education system. The organization outlined those goals in its four-year strategic plan, which it released in January.
Mr. Merisotis said that while more investment in higher education was necessary, “we are skeptical that there will be dramatic new investments to the scale that will allow us to supersize the system. We’ve got to design a better system.”