School Of Hard Knocks: College Edition

Thanks to massive cuts in state education budgets, America will only continue to fall behind the rest of the world in number of college graduates.

Only one in five of those who enroll in community colleges — and, in some states, barely one in 10 — graduates in three years, while only about half of students who attend universities get their bachelor's degrees within six years, helping drag the United States from first to 10th in the world in the proportion of the population that has graduated from college.


It's a trend that Obama, in a speech on the Macomb campus, promised to reverse. Yet conversations with dozens of experts and reviews of available data show that obstacles on the road to graduation have gotten only greater in the two years since then. Few believe the 2020 target will be met.

"The outlook is not good," says Michael Lovenheim, an assistant professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University and co-author of a 2010 study that found students are taking more, not less, time to graduate thanks to such things as continued deep cuts in public higher education budgets and services, enrollment increases and steep hikes in tuition that are forcing more students to work.

The study by Lovenheim and his colleagues upended the common contention by universities that graduation rates are falling because students are arriving unprepared. American high school graduates are, in fact, better prepared than ever, it found, but most go to unselective community colleges and public universities where budgets and services have been deeply cut, classes are large, and per-student expenditures are low.

It's gotten to the point that even community colleges are now priced out of reach for Americans.  And Republicans, demanding smaller government and less spending, have only made the situation worse.  American high school students in 2011 simply can't afford college anymore without ending up in massive debt.

And as Republicans continue to demand that we cut spending instead of raise revenues, this problem will only get worse.  America will continue to fall further and further behind other countries, where jobs and companies will go.  Remember that next time someone tells you there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats.