News that First Lady Michelle Obama is planning to focus on increasing college degree attainment (“Michelle Obama Edges Into a Policy Role on Higher Education,” New York Times, November 11, 2013) for lower-income students is a welcome development for a number of reasons.
Students from underserved communities – including low-income and minority students – consistently perform less well than their peers when it comes to academic achievement, college attainment, and persistence. Mrs. Obama, who grew up in a blue-collar family on Chicago’s South Side and graduated from two Ivy League schools, is a perfect person to carry this torch. We should not look to her as the exception, but as the example.
“I’m here today because I want you to know that my story can be your story,” Mrs. Obama told students at a Washington D.C. school Tuesday.
I agree. As president of EDWorks, a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, which focuses on helping first-generation college-goers from underserved communities obtain college credits while in high school, I share a similar story. As the first person in my working-class family to attend college, I attribute my success to the high expectations and support from a key group of teachers, principals and community stalwarts who believed that I could attend and graduate from Harvard University (1987).
Attending college is little more than a pipe dream for far too many underserved students, but it does not have to be that way.
Our organization, EDWorks, has supported more than 30 early college high schools, including Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) in Brooklyn, at which President Obama spoke last month. In our schools with multiple graduating classes, 79 percent of students earn at least 30 hours of college credit, 33 percent earn 60 hours of college credit, and 40 percent earn 30 to 55 hours of college credit while still in high school. What’s more, 95 percent of students continue in higher education, with an 87.3 percent persistence rate at four-year institutions.
Not only are there social implications to having fewer students going to college, but there are long-term negative economic consequences. A 2013 report by the Lumina Foundation notes that by 2025 the United States workforce needs about 23 million more people with college degrees than the nation’s colleges and universities will have produced by then. Currently, only about 39 percent of adults across the nation have college degrees; worse yet, only about 13-15 percent of low income and minority adults have college degrees.
This means that we’ll need about 300,000 more people to graduate college every year if we want to reach those goals.
In 1962, President Kennedy declared that the United States would place a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The stakes were high and global technological superiority hung in the balance. As we now know, that goal was accomplished – and more.
Ensuring more students – especially the historically underserved – should be no less important to our country’s future than Kennedy’s moonshot. And that’s why we applaud the First Lady and stand with her as she seeks to bring more light and heat on a problem that can’t be ignored another moment.