Washington — In response to President Obama’s call last month for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, a public-policy group released a set of recommendations today for how states could help the country achieve that lofty goal.

The group, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, writes in the report that “states and their colleges and universities will only exacerbate existing problems of access, affordability, equity, and economic competitiveness if they follow past patterns of responding to revenue shortfalls by shifting the financial burden to students and their families.” Instead, the group says, states should deem college access their top priority, finding ways to admit all eligible students to two- and four-year institutions while aiming to reach enrollment capacity at broader institutions that can serve more low- and middle-income families.

More specifically, the group suggests that colleges share resources to raise the likelihood that all students could somehow be served by a state’s higher-education system. All qualified community-college transfers should be automatically admitted to a state’s four-year colleges, the report says, even if the increase in in-state students means less revenue from out-of-state students, who typically pay higher tuition.

The group also addresses the states’ role in education access, saying that higher education should not face disproportionate cuts and that need-based aid should remain intact, even at the expense of merit-based awards.

The group acknowledges that productivity will need to be raised to meet those goals, so it suggests increasing faculty workloads, freezing or cutting graduate-student enrollments, closing low-demand programs, and promoting accelerated-learning programs to get students through college faster and at lower cost. —Megan Eckstein