The Myth Continues

Nicholas Kristof's column today urges President-elect Obama to move education to the front of the policy line. We're all for that here at The Quick and the Ed. But Kristof commits a major sin by repeating the line, that we've twice debunked, that the current generation is the first to have less education than their parents. The line is false both in rhetoric and fact.

I understand Kristof's pain. He's trying to create a crisis where one doesn't exist so as to transfer energy into an important issue. Realistically, our schools as a whole aren't bad; they're just kind of...flat. Take some time to look at the original data where the claim comes from, and here's what you'll find:

• the United States had and continues to have a very high percentage of its adults completing a higher education degree.
• while that percentage has crawled upwards here in the States, other countries have cleared it. Where once we were first, we're now tenth.
• our high school graduation rate has fluctuated between 70 and 75 since at least 1995. Some years are better, some are worse.
• many of our adults acquire GEDs over time, boosting the percentage of the population with a high school diploma. That rate hovers around 87 percent for all generations.
• college graduates in the US continue to have success finding employment for themselves, creating it for others, and capitalizing on their credentials to boost income.

The scariest statistic is not the one Kristof repeats. It is that we have one of the highest rates of college entry, but we have yet to figure out how to get them through college:

Only 54% of entrants to higher education in the United States obtain a degree. Along with New Zealand, this is the lowest survival rate among OECD countries, where the average is 71% and as high as 91% as in Japan.