Hitting Home: Quality, Cost, and Access Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today

A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that high-skill jobs that require advanced learning will make up almost half of all job growth in the United States by 2014. Present trends indicate that there will be a dearth of adequately educated workers to fill these new jobs: as a result of changing demographics, rising costs and prices, the erosion of quality, and structural forces preventing work on these problems, ground is being lost in helping to ensure that all Americans can attend college at a cost the nation and its families can afford. Ground is also being lost to other countries in the area of degree production, largely because of relatively low completion rates. A new report, "The Degree Gap," estimates that the United States will need to produce 15.6 million more Bachelor's and Associate's degrees beyond currently expected levels if the nation is to keep up with its best-performing peers. After describing these issues, the author discusses the need to establish goals and metrics to support strategic plans and public agendas for increased degree production, and presents several possible strategies for meeting these goals. (Contains 5 figures.) [This report was produced by Jobs for the Future on behalf of Making Opportunity Affordable, an initiative of the Lumina Foundation for Education.]