In the eyes of many, the United States has been viewed as the pinnacle of higher education and learning. But the elite universities of the United States, to which domestic and international students flock in increasing numbers, sit atop a pyramid which, at its base, may be crumbling.
A recent study prepared by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems found that degree completion rates are dropping throughout the United States - at a far faster rate than in the rest of the industrialized world.
According to the report, an estimated 48 million undergraduate degrees will be awarded between 2005 and 2025, but to keep pace with the rest of the developed world, 64 million degrees would need to be awarded during the same period.
At Tufts, 91 percent of students complete a bachelor's degree within six years, according to the Tufts Student Services Web site. This bucks a national retention rate of 55 percent.
Tufts Assistant Professor of Education Sabina Vaught suggested that one reason the United States may be falling behind in the proportion of citizens receiving bachelor's degrees is lack of assistance.
"I think one of the key issues for many students is the kind of support they receive," Vaught said. "Some students come to college with generations of family having attended college and being comfortable with higher education."
Vaught added that those students whose families have had less higher education are at a disadvantage and cannot count on a high school diploma to make up for it.
She added that the U.S. education system fails to evenly prepare all of its students, and that this is part of a deeper sociological issue tied to class.
"There's an investment in this society in keeping a class system in place, and one of the means of access to class mobility is higher [education]. Funding aside and access aside, it's my perception that the society is focused around keeping higher education exclusive," she said. "Our class system mandates that few people can experience true mobility. So, greater rates of graduation would, unfortunately, contradict dominant ideologies."
Associate Professor of Economics David Garman said that an increasing cost of tuition has combined with a decreasing level of state support for higher education, a pattern which may compound the sociological problem discussed by Vaught.
"In general, in the [United States], higher education costs are higher. If anything is driving this [problem], it's probably the increasing tuitions at state universities," Garman said.
Garman cited a decrease in state support for higher education as a reason for rising tuition costs. "If you go back twenty or more years, most states had fairly low tuitions for in-state residents. Over the past twenty to thirty years, the state subsidies to those public colleges and universities have fallen quite a bit in real terms, so that state college and university tuitions have gone up substantially."
Although many Federal loan programs and university financial aid packages are created to ease this educational differential, Garman suggested that some of the programs designed to aid lower-income students may actually be helping their more fortunate counterparts.
"Programs like scholarship programs that are tied into grades or class rank aren't going to help those who are in the bottom portion of the class. Those who are at the top of the class ... in general will be less needy than those in the bottom half of the class," Garman said. "It means that that bottom group of students is going to feel that paying the tuition is more of a burden. They're more likely to be more discouraged."
Though some schools, including Tufts and Harvard, have worked to eliminate this gap by providing full tuition to low-income families, Garman suggested that the issue must be confronted on a national level, not just in the United States' most elite institutions.
"The top 10 selective colleges already offer generous financial aid to low income students. A low income student wouldn't have had to pay tuition at Harvard for the past ten years," Garman said. "If you really want to talk about what's happening, you have to think about what's happening at the state universities and junior colleges."
Vaught suggested that even if students attain enough money to attend college, they may not succeed academically because of inadequate preparation on both the high school and college levels.
"My question would be: Are certain students unprepared or is it that the university isn't prepared to support them? Is any given institution prepared to receive and support students? I really believe that's where the answer is going to come from: institutions saying we have some accountability; we have to prepare ourselves to support our students," she said.
While it is easy to jump to conclusions when stacking U.S. education next to foreign education, Former Tufts Provost and current Professor of German Sol Gittleman said he objects to an apples-to-apples comparison.
"Trying to compare any other educational system [to ours] is futile," he said. "We are so different, so unique, for good and bad reasons that trying to figure out how our numbers stack up to their numbers is very, very difficult."
Gittleman cited some European countries' practices of admitting only elite students as a difference that puts the two systems on very different playing fields, and one reason international completion rates are much higher.
"We have huge numbers of mediocrities in grades K-12 because we are a democracy and everyone goes to school," Gittleman said. "Germany has 200 superb universities of highest quality you can imagine, but they are for the best that Germans can produce."
