President Obama laid out in his unofficial State of the Union Address this evening the goal that by 2020 the U.S. would have the highest high school graduation rate among industrialized nations. That got me wondering as to where we stood on this metric today. The answer: very far behind other industrialized countries!
The data below came from the College Board which summarized the OECD report on levels of educational attainment among OECD members:
- In 24 OECD countries, the average lifetime educational expectancy is between 16 and 21 years. Australia and the United Kingdom have the highest educational expectancy (20.7 years), while the average in the United States is almost four years less (16.9 years). The United States is 20th of the 28 OECD countries (OECD, 2006).
- According to OECD’s calculations, the United States’ high school graduation rate (76 percent) is below the OECD average of 82 percent, and well below the graduation rates in Greece, Germany, Finland, Japan, Korea, Norway, and Ireland, all of which had graduation rates above 90 percent (OECD, 2007b).
- SLA Note: This puts the U.S. as #20 among OECD countries. If the U.S. was looking for examples of countries who have significantly increased their graduation rates recently, here are a few that saw 10% increases in the 1995-2006 period
- Greece, Norway, Czech Republic
- SLA Note: This puts the U.S. as #20 among OECD countries. If the U.S. was looking for examples of countries who have significantly increased their graduation rates recently, here are a few that saw 10% increases in the 1995-2006 period
- The United States ranks first among the 30 OECD countries for the percent of 55- to 64-year-olds who have a high school degree or equivalent. However, the United States drops to 11th among 25- to 34-year-olds. In contrast, Korea ranks 24th among 55- to -64-year-olds but first among 25- to 34-year-olds (OECD, 2006).
Postsecondary Education
- 39 percent of the adult population in the United States has attained a postsecondary degree — well above the OECD average of 31 percent (OECD, 2006).
- Between 1995 and 2005, the United States’ postsecondary graduation rate increased slightly from 33 to 34 percent. This is below the OECD average (36 percent) and well below the highest rates of more than 45 percent reported by Australia, Iceland, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark and Poland (OECD, 2007b).
- Although the United States’ graduation rates have remained steady over the last decade, other countries have improved at a faster rate. As a result, the United States’ ranking has fallen from second of 17 OECD countries in 1995 to 16th of 27 OECD countries in 2005 (OECD, 2006).
- The United States has a comparatively low graduation rate, in part because the U.S. has the highest college dropout rate among OECD countries (OECD, 2007b).
--------
For those of you who have made it this far and are wondering about BHAG, it stands for "Big hairy audacious goal" and was coined by business author Jim Collins ("Built to Last") and refers to an extremely ambitious, long term goal.
Comments