Wednesday, March 16, 2016

NUMBER OF COLLEGE DEGREES HAS SOARED

            “If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment and prosperity. The consensus dates back at least to 1636, when the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College as America’s first institution of higher learning.

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            “In the 2000-2001 academic year, American colleges and universities awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly 40 percent, to more than 1.7 million. About 70 percent of all high school graduates now go
to college, and half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a college degree. That’s a big change, In 1980, only one in six Americans twenty-five and older were college graduates. Fifty years ago, it was fewer than one in 10.”

                       
Cassidy, John, “College Calculus, What’s the Real Value of College Education?” New Yorker, September 7, 2015, pp: 80-84.