Once upon a time, a college degree in America meant a sure path to employment. But with a job-applicant pool higher than it’s been in years and with more Americans holding college degrees, college diplomas come with no employment guarantee.
That hardly means people should start ditching school. If anything, the opposite is true. Today, a college degree is becoming yesterday’s high school diploma — a prerequisite in a crowded job market.
Yet we’ve watched as America has slumped to a paltry 10th place in the world in the percentage of citizens who have a college degree. Closer to home, we’re worse than that, with fewer than 20 percent of Tennessee ninth-grade students finishing college within six years of graduating from high school.
That’s bad news for a state poised to move ahead in the world of high-tech jobs.
Most people agree that public education is of paramount importance and should be properly funded. Disagreement occurs over where the funding should come from.
We’re good at the short-term fix in this country, letting a problem boil over before cleaning up the mess, but one has to wonder if a long-term education fix is not more important than some any other expensive initiatives, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program at almost $1 trillion and health care reform, also about $1 trillion.
Fixing our education problems won’t happen immediately. It took years and heavy investment to raise high school graduation rates in America.
It also took conviction.
Right now, we need it all to get college graduation rates on the rise — time, investment and, most important, conviction.