Posted on July 26, 2010

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Grantmakers, Government Aligning to Encourage College Completion

While access to college has been a major concern of policy experts, academics, and philanthropists in recent decades, college completion rates have emerged as a leading item on the national agenda more recently, the New York Times reports.

According to the College Completion Agenda 2010 Progress Report, a new report from the College Board, the United States — once the world leader in the proportion of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 with a postsecondary degree — has fallen to twelfth among thirty-six developed nations. Canada now leads the world in educational attainment, with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least an associate's degree in 2007, compared with 40 percent in the U.S. While almost 70 percent of high school graduates in the U.S. enroll in college within two years of graduating, only 57 percent enrolled in a bachelor's degree program graduate within six years and fewer than 25 percent who start in a community college graduate with an associate's degree within three years.

"This is a problem that's been around for too long. But now there's beginning to emerge a focus of attention and activity that quite frankly we haven't had till now," said William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. One example of that attention is a recent commitment by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of up to $110 million to improve remedial programs in an effort to increase college graduation rates.

In May, Grantmakers for Education convened a group of philanthropists and policy experts to discuss ways to bolster college completion rates. The group's first five recommendations involve K-12 education and include more state-financed preschool programs, better high school and middle school college counseling, more dropout prevention programs, better alignment with international curricular standards, and efforts to improve teacher quality.

"We led the world in the 1980s, but we didn't build from there," said Kirwan. "You can't address college completion if you don't do something about K-12 education."