You are here: Home / Archives for global competition

1/3 of young Americans hold college degrees

November 7, 2012 by

One-third of the nation’s 25- to 29-year-olds have completed at least a bachelor’s degree, accordin to a Pew study. That’s a new high. Sixty-three percent have completed at least “some” college. And 90 percent have a high school diploma or GED.

With fewer job prospects, young adults are staying in school, Pew reports. In addition, many more people believe a college education is necessary to get ahead in life. In a 2010 Gallup poll, 75 percent said a college education is “very important,”up from 36 percent In 1978.

However, the U.S. higher education system is no longer the best in the world, according to a 2011 Pew survey of college presidents.  ”College presidents are concerned about the quality, preparedness and study habits of today’s college students,” Pew reports. Fifty-two percent say college students today study less than their predecessors did a decade ago; just 7 percent say they study more.

 

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , ,

U.S. is big spender on education

November 4, 2012 by

The U.S. spends twice as much per student on education as the OECD average, reports BrainTrack.

How Much Do Nations Spend on Students?
From: BrainTrack.com

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Can our students compete?

July 25, 2012 by

U.S. athletes will go for gold in the Olympics, but U.S. students aren’t competing well in the global arena, argues Michelle Rhee in promoting a new Students First video.

The U.S. never has scored well on international exams, notes Gary Rubenstein.

In the 1964 FIMS test, we were 11th out of 12. These tests are not predictors of future economic strength, obviously since our students from 1964 have helped make the U.S. economy very strong.

U.S. schools score well when compared to schools in countries with similar poverty levels, he adds.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Koala dads, creative kids

July 5, 2012 by

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World  by Harvard’s Tony Wagner is written for “Waldorf parents, Montessori moms and Koala dads,” according to Education Gadfly.

The premise is that America needs to foster more innovation and grow more entrepreneurs—both the STEM and social varieties—to remain globally competitive. Drawing on 150 interviews (and ten case studies of young innovators), Wagner argues that play, passion, and purpose must dominate one’s growth (through childhood and into college). . . . He exalts disruptive innovation, calls for abolishing “publish or perish” tenure determinations for professors, concedes that content cannot be drowned in an effort to boost process skills, and posits an interesting charter-like reboot of college education.

Living in Silicon Valley, I meet lots of entrepreneurs who are both very well-educated in technical fields and creative risk takers. Many are immigrants drawn to the U.S. by the entrepreneurial culture — or they’re the children of supportive, engaged, educated parents.

Teens have formed an entrepreneurs’ clubat Palo Alto High, my daughter’s alma mater, reports the New York Times.

Like many young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Matthew Slipper knows that success does not come easy. His first startup, an online education venture, flopped. His second, a video-sharing app for the iPhone, has sold only 20 copies.

But Slipper is optimistic. He should be. He’s just 18, a founding member of the Paly Entrepreneurs Club, an extracurricular group at the local high school that sprang into existence last September — the brainchild of about a dozen students committed to inventing the future.

. . . Founding a company in high school is “a great opportunity,” said Vincent Gurle, 18. Later in life, “if you fail at business you might have to go live with your parents,” he said. “But we’re already doing that.”

It helps to have parents and neighbors who have started or financed high-tech companies.

Filed Under: College, Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Like U.S., Japan faces ‘skills gap’

October 15, 2011 by

In Japan, talented 15-year-olds can go directly to technical colleges that mix academic rigor and “workplace know-how,” writes Blaine Harden in the Washington Post.

. . . they turn into full-time nerds-in-training, enrolling in colleges where they make robots and write software, test diodes and study English, dirty their hands on factory floors and wait for job offers to come flooding in. . . . Graduates of the standard five-year course at Japan’s 57 national colleges of technology, collectively known as Kosen, can each expect about 20 job offers, school officials say. Students who stay on for an extra two years of advanced study receive about 30 offers.

Only one percent of students, often from working-class families, go to Kosen. Most Japanese students go to universities, which don’t offer practical training, says Motohisa Kaneko, director of research at the Center for National University Finance and Management. “Even the basic competence of university graduates in engineering is rather dubious.”

The skills gap that troubles Japan is tormenting the United States. Since 2000, the percentage of U.S. young adults aged 20-24 with jobs has fallen from 74 percent to 62 percent, a level not seen since the 1930s, according to a 2011 study by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. It concluded that the “college-for-all” system that emerged in the United States after World War II is failing the majority of American youth.

By the time they reach their mid-20s, only about 40 percent of Americans earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, census data show.

“We are leaving a lot of kids behind,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “High school in America is about preparing for a college degree that most young people will not get, and in the meantime these kids are disconnected from anything that is real in the world of work.”

The story is the first in the Hechinger Report‘s Lessons from Abroad series on how our  international competitors are educating their young people.

Forty-one percent of Americans 25 to 34 years old have earned an associate or bachelor’s degree. South Korea, where 63 percent of young adults hold a credential, leads the world, followed by Canada and Japan, both at 56 percent. Russia is fourth, at 55 percent.

The series will examine higher education in China, India, Japan and South Korea, as well as Canada, Great Britain and Ireland.

 

 

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , ,