Of course, we have used a goal for higher education attainment to focus our work at Lumina, and we believe it has helped focus the national discussion as well. The lessons learned from the UN’s use of goals are very similar to ours — for example, they cite the need for goals “to be established in absolute rather than proportionate terms.” That has been our experience as well—a goal of 60% attainment is more powerful than one to “double the numbers,” although both are better than no goal at all.

According to McArthur’s analysis, the UN development goals have been effective in large part because they are ambitious, simple, long term, and quantifiable. However, one big challenge for strengthening them in the next round is addressing the “messiness” of data and indicators. We can certainly relate to that problem!

We have not come across very many examples of the use of goals as a way to focus efforts across a wide range of actors, including policymakers. Considering the wide range of stakeholders in higher education, and the highly decentralized design of the U.S. higher education system, traditional top-down approaches don’t work. But the same is even truer when you consider driving action to reduce poverty across the globe—the range of stakeholders and conflicting agendas is immense. That goal setting has proven itself to be an effective approach in this context is very revealing.

The Chamber hosted its 11th annual State of Education Address last week. The luncheon serves as an annual display of the Chamber’s commitment to education as part of its long-term strategic plan for the region.

This year’s keynote speaker was Dr. Dewayne Matthews, vice president for policy and strategy of the Lumina Foundation. Matthews presented research from the foundation regarding the growing demand for skilled workers with high-quality degrees and credentials.

“The latest economic recession has had a devastating effect on mid skill level jobs. Many jobs, such as manufacturing, where workers could formerly be trained on the job now require training and/or certifications prior to beginning work,” Matthews said. According to Lumina, workforce demands in coming years will require the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to increase to 60 percent by the year 2025, a level of attainment that has consistently hovered near 40 percent for several decades.

According to Matthews, reaching that goal begins with PK-12 education. “We should start by making sure that the standards for high school graduation are the same those for college readiness,” Matthews said.

Matthews’ comments were timely, as the Oklahoma legislature is currently considering how state funding will or won’t change for the coming year.

“We were thrilled to have Dr. Matthews as our speaker for the State of Education,” said Susan Harris, the Chamber’s senior vice president of education and workforce. “The Lumina Foundation’s research validates the Chamber’s advocacy for increased state funding for education. Recent funding cuts have caused districts to increase class sizes to such a large size that student learning is impacted; career tech programs for demand occupations have waiting lists of six to eighteen months; and higher education cannot educate more students without funding for more instructors,” Harris said.

The Chamber and its 56 OneVoice partners are currently pushing five top state-level priorities, including: increasing funding for public PK-12, career and higher education and oppose any diversion of educational revenue sources such as property tax caps and tax exemptions and further reductions in the income tax rate.

Click here to download Dr. Matthews’ presentation.

But I hear you asking: “Thrun’s first class – the one that got all the publicity – was equivalent to a Stanford course, and at that time he was a tenured full professor. Why would anyone sign up for a course from a new startup with a funny name, and why would employers believe the course was of high quality?”

Staven’s answer is in this statement: “At top universities, the rigor of the classes is guaranteed almost entirely by the faculty teaching them. Since Udacity has distinguished faculty who also teach at top universities or have impressive records in industry, we feel the classes are comparable. The rigor of classes at most universities is guaranteed by the faculty, not by some process within the university. As long as Udacity continues to attract outstanding teachers, we can be comparable to great universities.”

This is a stunning statement. Do we really know so little about what quality education is and how to recognize it in students? I suspect most people would find Staven’s statement logical and even obvious, but I find its implications disturbing. To offer high quality educational opportunities to all who need them, there must be a better way to assure the quality of learning.

However, open courseware appears to have reached a breakout point with the publicity about the Stanford artificial intelligence course that enrolled 160,000 students, with 23,000 completing. The feature of the Stanford course that made it unique (and may have driven the enormous interest) was their announcement that they would award a certificate to students who completed the course.

More or less simultaneously, and perhaps in response, MIT launched MITx, which promises to award certificates to students completing courses and credentials for completing defined sequences of courses.

So now we have Coursera, which launched with $16 million in venture capital and has signed up five elite institutions to offer free courses. Their ambition is bold, as stated in their vision statement: “We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.” According to the business press, Coursera’s business model is based on charging either students or employers for validating the learning of students obtained through their courses. Udacity, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, who taught the Stanford course, is another startup in this space.

Of course, MIT, Stanford and the rest are not dummies – they know the true market value of what they are selling lies in the degree, not the course content. It’s the recognition that one has actually completed those courses and mastered what they teach that matters in the marketplace. Which is why the new approaches of open courseware providers to grant some sort of certificate, credit, or credential is so interesting.

My quote in the article spoke to how this shift is affecting individuals: “People are getting the information they need to understand that they really need post-secondary education to have a viable middle-class life. Jobs that give them any realistic shot at economic security come from education beyond high school.”

The Census data shows once again that people with higher levels of education make more than those without, but also pointed out the growing relationship between education and employment. In this economy, that’s probably even more important.

The Census data is worth checking out, but a more complete picture will emerge from Lumina’s new report A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education, which will be released on March 27. That report includes higher education attainment rates for every state and county in the U.S., along with the top 100 metro regions. A Stronger Nation also describes higher education attainment in the context of current economic trends, and shows how the U.S. can move more aggressively to increase it to the levels the nation needs.

Related news:
U.S. Bachelor Degree Rate Passes Milestone | New York Times | Feb. 23, 2012

It is not a pretty picture, but it’s a very clear one. In 1970, a high school diploma was more than sufficient to assure good employment prospects with a solid middle class income. Of course, this is no longer true. Aside from showing how dire the prospects are for males with just a high school diploma (imagine how bad they are for high school dropouts), the chart show this is the result of a long term trend that has accelerated in recent years.

What is going on here? The short answer is the increasing demand for higher skills across almost all industries and occupations. The chart documents the declining number of low skilled but well paid jobs in manufacturing, construction, natural resources, and other industries. Most of these industries have not gone away, but the skills they require have increased (manufacturing is a good example). To get the skills they need, employers show a clear preference for workers with higher levels of education, and pay an increasing premium to get them. This is happening within occupations—not just across them—which has huge implications for education systems. More on that next time.

The data are by some accounts deceiving, and by others, absolute nonsense, and Dewayne knows that.  First, these are population ratios, in which the trend in denominators are conveniently neglected.  The US denominator is growing; those of most others in the bin are flat or declining.  Your 4th grade math should tell you what happens to percentages under those basic, undeniable facts. Second is the impact of the turn to 3-year bachelor’s degrees in Bologna Process countries since 2003. Guess what happens to degree completion ratios?  Third is the inclusion of what we call associate’s degrees (ISCED 5B in international accounting), where the US does miserably compared with those countries that have these “short-cycle” credentials (e.g. Japan, Korea, Canada, Ireland, France, Denmark, and others).  Fourth are the Canadians, who even OECD notes inflate their degree completion data by including certificates with associate’s degrees.  International comparisons of this type are lousy reasons to push for more degrees, but it’s the going propaganda goad.  What a shame!

Cliff is an old friend and valued colleague, so I try not to take it too personally when he accuses me of either being deliberately deceptive or writing “absolute nonsense” (I’m not sure which is worse). Let me just say for the record that I believe the OECD data on education attainment is both accurate and important, and I believe everything I wrote in my post on the subject.

Let’s take Cliff’s four points in turn. First; of course these are population statistics. The issue is whether the overall education level of the population matters. I believe very strongly that it does. Second; I have seen no evidence that Bologna cycle degrees account for the increase in attainment rates in European countries. I’ve never heard Cliff argue that European degrees are lower in quality than US degrees. Besides, many of the countries that have higher attainment rates than ours are not in the Bologna process, including the top three. As to Cliff’s third point, I’d say fine—increasing dismal rates of Associate degree completion would be an excellent place for us to start to increase overall attainment. As to his fourth, exclude Canada and we’ve only fallen to 14^th. Yes, I’m being sarcastic.

I continue to use and talk about the OECD data for two reasons. The first is that I believe it points to the increasing global demand for skills and knowledge in advanced economies. The second, as I said in my original post, is that I believe it shows we can do better.

The first answers the frequent question about whether recent college graduates are actually getting jobs in today’s labor market. According to this chart, the answer is an emphatic yes. It shows the employment rates of all Americans aged 23 and 24 who are not in school. As you can see, college graduates in that age group are already employed at much higher rates than non-college graduates, who presumably have been in the labor market longer. Even people with some college are much better off in terms of employment. The chart also shows average income is, of course, much higher for college graduates. Best of all, the data is very recent (2010).

The second chart shows unemployment (and underemployment) by level of education. This chart is similar to one I already use in my speeches and presentations, and shows (perhaps not surprisingly) that unemployment is much lower for people with college degrees. However, adding data for 2010 shows something both interesting and important. As unemployment leveled off at higher levels in 2010, two things became clear – 1. Job loss in the recession was MUCH worse for people with lower levels of education, and 2. The recession made this disparity even greater than it was before. Compare how much farther apart the lines are today compared to even 2008.

Good stuff!

• The U.S. has slipped to 15th in the proportion of young adults (25 to 34) who have obtained a two- or four-year college degree. Last year, the U.S. was tied for 8th.
• The reasons the U.S. fell so dramatically is that the U.S. rate fell by one percent (from 42% to 41%) while other countries increased. (The U.S. also lost one position due to the addition of Israel to OECD this year.)
• The top three countries are the same as last year: South Korea, Canada, and Japan. South Korea’s attainment rate (25 to 34) increased by an astounding 5%; from 58% to 63%.
• For all adults (25 to 64), the U.S. ranks 4th at 41%, behind Canada, Israel, and Japan.
• In four-year degrees for young adults, the U.S. now ranks only 11th. Last year, we ranked 7th.
• At 9%, the U.S. ranks 20th (out of 33) in two-year degree attainment.

Our take away from this data is very simple: We must do better.

To understand how this works, we can first consider employment growth in the economic recovery. Naturally enough, we tend to think of employment as a lagging indicator of recovery. In the current weak recovery, unemployment has remained stubbornly high. A lot of hypotheses have been advanced to explain this, but there is a growing consensus that a large part of the explanation is that the economic recovery is being hindered by a lack of workers with the advanced skills and knowledge demanded in this economy. Put another way, our ability to retool and “up-skill” workers to meet the changing requirements of employment markets is itself a significant factor in economic growth.

David Altig, the research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, has written about the unexplained causes of the slow recovery of the job market from the recession. According to Altig, based on standard econometric models the U.S. unemployment rate should be significantly lower than it is. He suggests that our inability to match jobs to people with the right skills may be the single most important factor in explaining why (the other factors being lack of mobility due to people being underwater on their mortgages and extended unemployment benefits). One of the more interesting things Altig says is that this mismatch is not at the level of specific occupations—i.e. unemployed auto workers needing to be retrained as nurses—but at a deeper level related to general skills across all occupations. Better educated workers are more adaptable, they learn new skills more quickly, and they contribute their thinking to innovation not just in new products, but just as importantly in streamlining and improving processes throughout the enterprise, whatever its mission.

Of course, we need to know more about the specific skills and knowledge needed in the workforce. Fortunately, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has developed powerful new approaches to answering this question. Developing a system with the capacity to help people develop higher level skills in the much larger numbers needed in today’s economy is the great challenge facing higher education.