Transcript

RUSS WHITEHURST: I will tell you some things that you know already. What we've seen in the U.S. over the last 15 or 20 years is an increasing divide among those who have a good education and those who do not. That divide is reflected in employment, income and all the other dimensions on which we measure success in this economy. We had the President of the United States in February in a joint address to Congress establish a new national goal of regaining the world's lead in college attainment by 2020, and I like I suppose many policy wonks went straight to the "OECD Education at a Glance" publication and looked at what the rates were and tried to figure out is it doable and how much progress would we need to show in order to meet the President's goal. It's a nice goal in that it's got no annual achievable objectives, so if we're talking about 4-year graduation rates, we've got to increase our attainment rates about 1 percent a year between now and 2020 just to get even with the leading nation now, and if we're including associate degrees, it's got to be about 1-1/2 percent a year. It's an audacious goal. The question is, is it obtainable?

One of the things we're going to learn today is that a lot of the action is going to have to be in college completion. We've seen healthy increases and trend lines in terms of the rates of college enrollment over the last 20 years. They over at a little less than percent now, but college completion rates have stagnated at under 60 percent. So we've got lots of students who have been convinced that it's good to go to college and who enter the college door but don't manage to make it to the finish line. Figuring out who those students are, what institutions can do to encourage them to finish, institutions and government, and how to test those policy prescriptions will be very important.

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