New Calls for Boosting College Graduation Rates
about the author
Jordan J. Frasier is a staff writer for NextGen Journal. He’s a senior at George Mason University studying political science and journalism. Jordan is a news editor for Connect2mason.com and is a network news intern in Washington D.C. Connect with him on twitter @jordanjfrasier and at jordanjfrasier.com.
Vice President Joe Biden compared the nation’s higher education system to a funnel when he spoke Tuesday about bolstering college graduation rates. The vice president spoke at the first annual Building a Grad Nation Summit where he announced a three-part initiative to help reach President Obama’s goal of having the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.
For current college students, the announcement came as an acknowledgement of a broken system, but Biden also pointed to previous moves by the Obama administration to make college more accessible and affordable to the nation’s students. Biden said that the administration has added $40 million to the Pell grant system, implemented tax credits and simplified the federal student aid application.
“We have to make the same commitment to getting folks across the graduation stage that we did to getting them into the registrar’s office,” Biden said. “The dreams and skills of our college graduates will pave the way to a bright economic future for our nation.”
The three-part initiative Biden unveiled calls on governors to hold state college completion summits. Biden also released a college completion kit for states to use in generating ideas for boosting graduation rates. He also announced a new grant competition for colleges.
Obama’s 2020 college graduation goal means a 50 percent, or 8 million, graduate increase in the next nine years. Part of the information released Tuesday breaks down that total goal into state-by-state contributions in the hopes of helping governors improve the statistics in their respective states.
Currently, the United States ranks ninth in college graduation rates behind countries like Canada, Russia, Japan, New Zealand and Norway. Korea shows the highest graduation rate with 58 percent of the country’s residents between the ages of 25 to 34 holding a college degree, according to statistics released by the Department of Education.
The Department of Education also broke down the national average of education completion with statistics that show out of 100 students who start 9th grade, 75 of those students will graduate from high school. Then, 51 of those students enter college where 29 of those students will leave with a college degree.
Also of interest is the fact that of those students who attend college, nearly half will transfer once at some point in their higher education career and 20 percent will transfer two or more times.
Today’s students also face a more than 400 percent increase in college tuition compared to the costs of going to school in the early 1980s. Those costs come as the median household income has only increased by about 150 percent.
