Why has education attainment in the United States been on a plateau in recent years?
The best work on this question is in the book The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz. They show how important the persistent increase in education attainment over much of the past century has been to economic growth. They suggest that we are approaching the limit on how much we can do just by expanding grade school and high school enrollment, which was hte big task up into the second half of the last century. We now need qualitative improvement in grade schools and high schools and big improvements in getting people into and especially through college. Q. Do you think we will be able to reach President Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college grads in the world by 2020? We are not forecasters. We believe that there is room for tremendous improvement and that we should start now. Q. What kinds of actions can TakePart readers take to help improve graduation rates? A big problem is that disadvantaged young people often lack for sound ad
