New York Times - September 7, 2006
Report Finds U.S. Students Lagging in Finishing College By TAMAR LEWIN
The United States, long the world leader in higher education, has fallen behind other nations in its college enrollment and completion rates, as the affordability of American colleges and universities has declined, according to a new report.
The study, from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, found that although the United States still leads the world in the proportion of 35- to 64-year-olds with college degrees, it ranks seventh among developed nations for 25- to 34-year-olds. On rates of college completion, the United States is in the lower half of developed nations.
"Completion is the Achilles' heel of American higher education,'' said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in San Jose, Calif., and Washington.
One particular area of concern, Mr. Callan said, is that younger Americans — the most diverse generation in the nation's history — are lagging educationally, compared with the baby boom generation.
"The strength of America is in the population that's closest to retirement, while the strength of many countries against whom we compare ourselves is in their younger population,'' he said. "Perhaps for the first time in our history, the next generation will be less educated.''
Over all, the report said, while other nations have significantly improved and expanded their higher education systems, the United States' higher education performance has stalled since the early 1990's.
At the same time, for most American families, college is becoming increasingly unaffordable. While federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 70 percent of the cost of a year at a four-year public university in the 1990's, Mr. Callan said, that has dropped to less than half.
"It's going backwards,'' he said. "Tuition is going up faster than family income, faster than inflation, faster even than health care.''
The report, which grades the states on how well they compare with the state with the best record, gives 43 states, including New York and Connecticut, an F for affordability. New Jersey got a D.
On average, a year at a public four-year university costs 31 percent of a family's income, the report said. But that figure hides the enormous difference between families in the bottom 20 percent of income, for which it would be 73 percent of annual income, and those in the top 20 percent, for which it would amount to only 9 percent.
The report, "Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education," paints a picture of an income-stratified society, with a huge educational gap between low- and high-income young adults. In 12 states, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds from high-income families who are enrolled in college is at least twice as great as those from low-income families; in five states, the high-income students are at least three times as likely to be in college.
In New York, 33 percent of young adults from families with the lowest fifth of incomes are in college, compared with 55 percent of those from the richest families, close to the national average. The figures for Connecticut are 16.1 percent from the bottom fifth and 57.9 percent from the top fifth. New Jersey's figures are 19.6 percent from the bottom fifth and 51.0 percent from the top.
Ethnic differences in college enrollment also persist, with four states having twice the percentage of white students in college as nonwhite students. The secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, plans to announce her own ideas for making higher education "affordable, accessible and consumer friendly for all Americans'' after the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that she created last fall delivers its final recommendations this month.
"In order to remain a leader in the global economy, our nation must adapt its higher education system to prepare Americans for the jobs of today and tomorrow,'' Ms. Spellings said yesterday.
The report is the fourth in the center's series of assessments of national and state performance, which it produces every two years. This is the first report to include international comparisons.
On the state level, New York rated an A– on both students' preparation and the proportion who complete their degrees. New Jersey got an A on preparation and a B on completion, Connecticut an A– on preparation and a B on completion.
The likelihood of a ninth grader in New York enrolling in college four years later has dropped to 37 percent, three percentage points below the national average, from 45 percent in the early 1990's. That is one of the steepest declines in the nation, and one the center attributed to a falling high school graduation rate in the state.
Even accounting for New York's Tuition Assistance Program for low- income students, the center found, attending a public two- or four- year college would cost low- and lower-middle-income students nearly half of their family's annual income.
"New York has one of the best financial aid programs in the country, but also one of the largest low-income populations that the program doesn't reach,'' Mr. Callan said.
Officials at the State University of New York, the City University of New York and the State Education Department took issue with the center's methodology and said New York's public universities were more affordable than portrayed.
The report "badly miscalculates New York's TAP program and inaccurately portrays higher education in New York as unaffordable,'' said John R. Ryan, the SUNY chancellor. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
The vice chancellor at CUNY, Jay Hershenson, said that, among other things, the report sharply understated the average amount of aid to undergraduates who receive state aid and failed to take into account more than a quarter-million students in nondegree programs that lead to college.