I’ve written before that the United States shouldn’t be so worried about ensuring that its college graduation rates are the best in the world. After all, shouldn’t we applaud rising educational attainment everywhere, even as we try to improve our own? A just-released paper by public-policy consultant Art Hauptman adds a further twist to the debate: What if the widely shared premise that the U.S. is falling behind other nations when it comes to college completion just isn’t true?
I won’t try to give a detailed summary of Hauptman’s closely argued analysis, which is worth reading in its entirety (you can also watch a video of the American Enterprise Institute conference at which his finding were presented). But he offers some very helpful tools for thinking about higher-education access and success, beginning with some definitions of terms that are often imprecisely used. The participation rate, defined as the percentage of a country’s population that enrolls in higher education, is fairly straightforward. But completion, the percentage of entering students who earn a degree, is often confused with attainment, which refers to the percent of the working population who have earned a degree.
As the United States has moved from an elite to a mass to a university system of higher education, Hauptman explains, our participation rate of around 70 percent immediately following high school gives us one of the highest rates among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Our college completion rates, which have been the subject of considerable concern, are mediocre – but have long been so, he writes. “Speakers or writers will assert we must regain our global leadership in college completion rates when we never exhibited such leadership, at least since we became a mass system of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s,” Hauptman writes. There’s an “inherent tension,” he adds, between widening access to postsecondary education and trying to improve completion rates.
Hauptman believe attainment rates are a particularly useful measure, because they measure both access to higher education and successful completion (a country that improves access significantly, even with a falloff in rates of completion, will still see improved attainment). Attainment rates also permit comparisons of educational achievement between workforce cohorts of different ages. And they make possible cross-national comparisons that distinguish between bachelor’s and sub-bachelor’s programs. Hauptman argues that mediocre attainment levels in the United States are primarily attributable to the poor showing of community college students: For every age group, the U.S. ranks much higher among OECD nations for bachelor’s degree attainment than it does for sub-bachelor’s degrees. Moreover, contrary to the commonly accepted narrative of declining or stagnant U.S. postsecondary attainment, overall U.S. attainment rates have gone up steadily over the past two decades, while bachelor’s degree attainment rates have been climbing for 60 years.
Hauptman isn’t calling for complacency about U.S. postsecondary education — he believes that it needs to be improved. But he’s like to see a focus on increasing the number of degrees awarded rather than on completion rates, He cites a pair of perverse incentives associated with the latter measure: “increased completion rates could be achieved by reductions in quality or increases in selectivity, both of which would be detrimental to the larger goal of increasing the share of adults with a credential that has real labor market value.” That’s an important note of caution. Above all, Hauptman’s work is a useful reminder that before decrying our educational shortcomings, or mounting new policy initiatives to tackle them, we should make sure that we understand the problem correctly in the first place.
