The Competitiveness Drivers

While U.S. higher education has often been seen as slow moving and traditional, there has in fact been great change in the U.S. higher education landscape since the founding of the first colonial colleges. A couple of observations that have been made numerous times by numerous authors is that the diversity of the U.S. system is its unique strength and that the integrity and tradition of certain core values is the reason why paradoxically our institutions are both trusted as well as misunderstood.

Sometimes with all the news sound bites and other noise we all encounter it is difficult to tell what has really changed recently and whether we should be concerned. Despite all the greatness of our system, there is real evidence that we could be doing better. The challenges are not in research or producing Nobel Prize winners (Bowen et al., 2005, pp. 56-60) – as exciting as that aspect of higher education is. The challenge has to do with being the most educated nation on earth and in essence continuing to be the leader in the model of a highly educated citizenry.

Here are five key competitiveness challenges. First, in the last 20 years the U.S. has dropped from first to seventh in the percentage of young adults attaining college degrees (OECD, 2005, p. 5). Second, despite better preparedness for college we are seeing no rise in the last 10 years in the percentage of high school graduates attending college (Measuring up 2004, 2004, p. 11) - an area in which there were previously dramatic gains (Bowen et al., 2005, pp. 69-72). Third, although gains have been made, we continue to see significant stratification of which college a student attends based on family income (Collins & Veskel, 2004, p. 132) (Bowen et al., 2005, p. 84-87). Fourth, while enrollments are projected to grow at a relatively modest 1.4% per year overall during the next 5-10 years (Gerald & Hussar, 2002), 20 states will see dramatic rises in enrollment that will pose significant capacity challenges (Martinez, 2004). And fifth, and probably most importantly, we continue to struggle with attainment or graduation rates at about 60% within 6 years (Choy, 2002a) with one study indicating that the time to achieving a BA degree has increased substantially since 1970 (Turner, 2004).