Educating America: "Easy as 1-2-3!(?)"
Words.
"It's the silent education crisis, the one we don't talk about much because its existence undermines the story we like to tell about our country.
The problems we face from kindergarten to 12th grade get regular, if still insufficient, attention. But we rarely confront how badly we're faring when it comes to educating our people after high school. That silent education crisis belies our claim that no nation comes close to us in guaranteeing that anyone can work hard, get a great education and soar.
...Today, the United States stands 10th in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who have earned a postsecondary degree. We're behind Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and France.
The information I've just offered comes from an important article by Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University, published this spring in the New York Review of Books. Delbanco concludes that "a great many gifted and motivated young people are excluded from college for no other reason than their inability to pay, and we have failed seriously to confront the problem."
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