It’s barely the beginning of the new year and higher education has already missed its “moonshot,” the goal of making the United States the world leader in college attainment by 2020. President Barack Obama issued that challenge to the nation in 2009 as part of his very first speech to Congress.
That aspiration was just one of many items on the newly elected president’s agenda to support economic recovery after the Great Recession. More training after high school was necessary, the president said, to give workers an opportunity for a well-paying job.
Obama’s call to improve completions lives on as a textbook example of the power of the bully pulpit.
“In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite,” Obama said.
More than a decade after that speech, the nation has fallen far short of becoming the world leader in college attainment. Finding and scaling the right policies and practices to drastically improve degree completions has been a daunting challenge. Competing priorities and the wreckage of the recession have made that task even harder. Meanwhile, countries like Canada, Japan, and South Korea keep moving the goalposts, making it mathematically difficult to close the gap with America’s international competition.
Even so, Obama’s call to improve completions lives on as a textbook example of the power of the bully pulpit. In setting an attainment goal, the president elevated two emerging and somewhat novel proposals: that all adults would need some sort of postsecondary credential to succeed in the workplace, and that all students who started a degree program should complete.
As a result, many institutions and states remain committed to increasing college completion, especially for students of color and those from low-income families. And college attainment is rising and is likely to continue that trend even as the population of traditional-age college students is expected to plunge after the middle of the new decade.
“Not everything the president says has a lasting impact,” said James Kvaal, president of the Institute for College Access and Success, “but this particular vision had a resonance, and changed the way colleges and policy makers see their roles.”
A National Movement
Since the publication of the 1983 report “A Nation At Risk,” elementary and secondary education had largely dominated political discussions at all levels. Obama’s new attainment goal was a significant milestone in the growing political relevance of postsecondary education.
The new risk, the president said, was that the United States ranked 10th on the postsecondary-attainment list compiled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, with about 38 percent of Americans holding a college degree.
The attainment goal not only shifted the national political focus to colleges, it introduced a shift in federal policy, from a spotlight on access and affordability for students to academic and workplace outcomes, said Kvaal, who served as deputy domestic policy adviser under Obama.
In other words, the problem wasn’t just that too few students were enrolled in college; too few were completing their programs. At four-year colleges, for instance, less than 60 percent of first-time, full-time students completed degrees within six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. At two-year colleges, less than a third of students completed degree programs within three years.
Some education analysts had identified completion as a problem, “but it was still an unconventional take,” Kvaal said.
In July 2009, the president unveiled his first federal initiative to improve college completions. The American Graduation Initiative proposed spending $12 billion, mostly through competitive grants, to help community colleges find and scale programs that improved student outcomes. The measure was also meant to help improve buildings on two-year campuses and expand online course offerings.
Later policies under the Obama administration were aimed at imposing accountability on colleges for their employment outcomes and protecting students from fraudulent institutions. But the administration also created the College Scorecard website to give more information about the graduation rates at individual institutions. And the Education Department put more pressure on accreditors — the gatekeepers for federal financial aid — for the academic outcomes of the colleges they oversee.
Colleges and accreditors pushed back against some of the accountability measures. But the administration could have asked for much more, said Amy Laitinen, who was a policy adviser to the Obama administration beginning in 2009.
“I don’t think it went all that far,” said Laitinen, now director of higher education for the nonpartisan think tank New America. “Why it felt more intense to the higher-education community is because nobody had been calling for anything before.”
Foundations Pitch In
While the president’s attainment goal was a relatively new idea, it didn’t start with his address to Congress. In 2009 major philanthropic organizations had already begun their efforts to build a policy framework to increase college attainment. The president’s announcement became a political springboard for their work.
Just months before Obama was elected president, the Lumina Foundation began developing its own lofty goal that 60 percent of the nation should have a postsecondary credential by 2025. The foundation pledged to focus its resources — coming from a billion-dollar endowment — as a catalyst to spark the necessary changes and policies to reach that level.
Similarly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced in November 2008 that it planned to spend several hundred million dollars over five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26.
With money from both Gates and Lumina, among others, a group called Complete College America was formed in 2009 to encourage states to improve their completion rates. Policy makers in 17 states signed up in the first year to meet the group’s policy objectives, such as setting an attainment goal, making it easier to transfer credits between public colleges, and reducing requirements for remedial education.
David A. Tandberg, vice president for policy research and strategic initiatives at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, was a special assistant to Pennsylvania’s secretary of education in 2009. Obama’s rhetoric and the foundations’ support made completion policies an easy sell for lawmakers in the Keystone State, which was among the first to join Complete College America.
More than 40 states and several cities and counties have signed on to an “alliance” of states pushing Complete College’s policy agenda. Michigan is one of the latest to join the compact.
Improving completions and attainment is crucial both for that state’s future work force and its colleges, said Daniel J. Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities. Michigan is among the many states in the upper Midwest and Northeast that are seeing declines in the number of high-school graduates, and having more college graduates is necessary just to fill the existing jobs, as well as to attract future employers, he said.
In 2010 the National Governors Association jumped on the bandwagon when Joe Manchin III, the Democratic governor of West Virginia at the time, chose college completion as the topic of his year as chairman of the bipartisan group.
With state elected officials on board, the policies to improve completion and attainment took on higher stakes. Lawmakers in several states began using “performance-based funding” to hold colleges accountable for degree completions.
About two-thirds of the states now base or are planning to base a portion of state appropriations to higher education on some measure of academic outcomes. The budget plans in most of those states, however, have moved far beyond graduation rates to include completions for minority students and credits earned for programs deemed important for the state’s economy.
The Recession’s Toll
Despite the still growing interest in improving college completions, the nation is nowhere close to leading the world in attainment. But there has been progress.
The proportion of Americans with any postsecondary credential increased by 10 percentage points from 2008 to 2017, to nearly 48 percent, according to the Lumina Foundation. But the biggest increase, more than five percentage points, occurred when those figures began to include work-force certificates that require less than an associate degree.
Nonetheless, the United States has made no ground on its international competitors. In South Korea, for example, 70 percent of people aged 25 to 34 have a postsecondary credential, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That includes more than 20 percent of students who have earned a credential equivalent to an associate degree or less.
In Canada and Japan, overall attainment is about 60 percent, and also includes at least 20 percent with less than a bachelor’s degree. In the United States, about 15 percent have either an associate degree or a work-force certificate, according to Lumina.
So, what happened? The economy gets a big share of the blame, say many in higher education, forcing state governments to cut colleges’ budgets and forcing them into survival mode.
“The wind got sucked out of the sails with the Great Recession,” said Sheeo’s David Tandberg. “At that point it just became a matter of trying to protect higher education.”
Politics didn’t help. The American Graduation Initiative was sidelined as the Obama administration refocused its efforts on passing the Affordable Care Act, said Laitinen, at New America. Instead of giving the $12 billion to community colleges, he gave the money to the Labor Department for work-force development. That was good,” she said, because “it showed that the administration was committed, but we couldn’t be as ambitious as we wanted to be.”
Another problem is that colleges and policy makers haven’t really figured out which policies and practices will drastically increase the percentage of students who complete a degree.
“Every state has a goal, but how many states have a robust plan to get there?” asked Kim Hunter Reed, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education. “We have incremental excellence, but we don’t have scaling of things we know that work.”
The push to improve rates of college completions, however, goes on even in many states where Republicans control the statehouse. And existing policies could extend that effort for a very long time.
Tandberg says the level of discussion about higher education in 2020 presidential campaigns is a good sign that student outcomes will remain an important focus into the future.
“I don’t think there’s been a presidential primary where higher education has played such a large role in the policy discussion, and that’s pretty telling,” he said.
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
