OUR GOAL
Lumina Foundation's goal is to increase the higher education attainment rate of the United States to 60 percent by the year 2025, an increase of 16 million graduates above current rates.
In the future, the college attainment gap will continue to widen as America's most-educated population faces retirement age. Given this reality, the United States is likely to face an unprecedented shortage of college-educated workers by 2020. The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems estimates the need to educate nearly 800,000 more college graduates each year from now through 2025 to compete with top-performing nations.
Three compelling needs drive Lumina Foundation's work to significantly increase higher education attainment:
- Closing gaps in attainment for underrepresented groups
- Meeting international benchmarks
- Meeting workforce demands
The needs are closely related and reflect the growing importance of higher education attainment in assuring personal opportunity, economic vitality, and social stability.
Closing attainment gaps
Educational opportunity in the United States is not equally available to all Americans. More than 30 percent of white, non-Hispanic American adults have at least four years of college, but only 18 percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Hispanics have reached the same level of attainment. Because the average income of Americans with a four-year degree is $43,000 per year, compared to $27,000 for those who possess a high school diploma, this chronic gap in educational attainment contributes to the disparities in income between racial and ethnic groups. This issue is of growing importance as the proportion of the population from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education grows rapidly. The United States is projected to become a majority minority country by 2050. Of the projected U.S. population growth of 56 million between 2000 and 2020, 46 million will be members of minority groups.
As labor economist Tony Carnevale has argued, higher education attainment has become the only reliable route to the middle class. This has implications beyond earnings potential—almost 95 percent of college graduates have employer-provided health insurance, while only 77 percent of high school graduates have coverage. Likewise, 90 percent of college graduates have employer-funded retirement funds, compared to 81 percent of high school graduates and 53 percent of high school dropouts. The consequences of not succeeding in higher education are increasingly detrimental, and it is a fact that these consequences fall disproportionately on members of groups underrepresented in higher education.
Meeting international benchmarks
The United States is slipping in international rankings of college attainment. The proportion of the U.S. population with a college degree—two- or four-year—has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years at just under 39 percent.
Several decades ago, this level of higher education attainment was the highest in the world, and the United States still ranks first in the proportion of college-educated adults between the ages of 55 and 64. Unfortunately, this level of degree production is no longer sufficient to meet the levels of other developed countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Other nations are reaching higher education attainment rates as high as 54 percent among their young adult population (ages 25-34), compared to a rate of just 39 percent in the United States. Today the United States ranks only 10th in the percentage of the young adult population with college degrees. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), rates of college degree attainment are increasing in almost every OECD country faster than in the United States. As a result, the gap will continue to widen unless the United States significantly improves rates of both college participation and completion, particularly for groups who have traditionally been underrepresented in higher education.
Reaching world-class levels of college attainment will require the United States to find ways to assure that dramatically more residents have the opportunity to succeed in higher education.
Meeting workforce needs
Higher education attainment is increasingly important to the economy, as the workforce demands higher levels of skills and knowledge. By 2025 there will be a shortage of 16 million college-educated adults in the U.S. workforce at current rates of production of college graduates. The clearest evidence for this growing shortage is that the gap in earnings based on level of education continues to widen.
Since 1975, the average earnings of high school dropouts and high school graduates fell in real terms (by 15 percent and 1 percent, respectively), while those of college graduates rose by 19 percent. Of even greater significance, there is clear evidence that the increasing value of higher education in the workforce reflects the skills and competencies developed by graduates while in college.
