What are the top skills employers demand? Communication skills, judgement and decision making, active listening to name a few. These skills are referred to as soft skills, or non-cognitive skills that are not measured by a cognitive or academic test, like IQ, for example.

In an age when our economy demands more college grads in order to fill the jobs of the future and to be globally competitive, the answer has been to make our classes harder and rank students, schools, and teachers by the scores students earn on their standardized test. Put more effort behind increasing IQ and get a better prepared workforce, right?

Wrong. Little to no research gives evidence that more rigorous classes or standardized tests will lead to more college graduates, according to the review, “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.” In fact, studies show the best indicator of success in college is not the difficulty level of classes a student took in high school or their standardized test scores, but rather their course grades, GPA, and class rank.

Researchers argue these standings are much more indicative of a student’s academic and economic potential because they measure, in part, the transferable and non-cognitive skills a student possesses:

“The prevailing interpretation is that, in addition to measuring students’ content knowledge and core academic skills, grades also reflect the degree to which students have demonstrated a range of academic behaviors, attitudes, and strategies that are critical for success in school and in later life, including study skills, attendance, work habits, time management, help-seeking behaviors, metacognitive strategies, and social and academic problem-solving skills that allow students to successfully manage new environments and meet new academic and social demands. To this list of critical success factors, others have added students’ attitudes about learning, their beliefs about their own intelligence, their self-control and persistence, and the quality of their relationships with peers and adults.”

This is one reason why parents put their kids on a soccer team, students are told to get involved in activities so they can highlight them on their college application,  and job seekers have a place to showcase their extracurricular achievements on their resumes. While there is no direct economic value to a child playing soccer, it is thought of as a social activity where people acquire the non-cognitive, or social and behavioral, skills that are necessary to get along with people at school and in the workplace, learn responsibility to a team, balance school and life, work under pressure, etc.

While classroom time is traditionally thought of as  a time to develop cognitive skills and after-school time is used for non-cognitive, the two skill sets are inextricably linked and don’t need to be exclusive. At LifeBound we train K-12 teachers, professors, advisors, tutors, and staff to use coaching skills to capitalize on the time they have with students and develop these non-cognitive skills for success in school, career, and life.

Through the coaching process, students answer questions and engage in self-reflective activities to mindfully create:

• Vision for what is possible
• Balance in their academic, social, and emotional lives
• Perspectives on the challenges they face and the choices they make
• Accountability to themselves and others
• Fulfillment from making choices that align with core values
• Habits of success to help address their personal strengths and weaknesses

What would your brightest students be capable of if they developed their non-cognitive skills alongside their cognitive? How would your struggling students benefit if they were asked powerful questions and learned to ask themselves powerful questions when they need help?

If you’re in the Denver area, join us on November 1 for a one-day Introduction to Academic Coaching. This training will give you a thorough introduction to the coaching process as well as leave you with coaching skills you can use Monday morning.  If you are interested in LifeBound coming to your area, email me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com for more information.

Could developing a kids’ thinking and behavioral skills cut crime among youth?

It’s a very good possibility, found a new study from the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. In the study, about 1400 kids in 7th through 10th grade from high-crime neighborhoods in Chicago were chosen to participate in the 30-week program Becoming A Man. A similar group was tracked who did not go through the course. Researchers found students who had been through the Becoming A Man program were 44% less likely to have been arrested by the end of the year.

The program uses Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which “aims to get people to think about the way they think, and to recognize unconscious patterns of thought that produce unhappy life outcomes,” according to NPR.  One activity the participants had to do began with the group dividing into teams of two. One kid had a ball and it was the job of the other teammate to get the ball from him. Fighting ensued, and the program leader stopped them and asked why not one of them just asked their teammate for the ball. The kids trying to get the ball thought it would show weakness. When the teammate with the ball was asked what they would have done if they would have been asked for the ball, they said they would have given it to their teammate. This activity helped students see that their perception of what the other person in a confrontation is thinking can often be “falsely imagined.”

Read the full story, “Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime,” at NPR.

Critical thinking, social, and emotional skills are just as important as academic skills for success in school, professional, and personal life. My books Critical & Creative Thinking for Teenagers and People Smarts for Teenagers are perfect for teens to learn critical thinking skills for school, home, and life. If you are interested in learning more about how these books can be used for a summer reading program or enrichment class at your school, contact me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post on May 8, 2013.

Last February, The National Center for Education reported that 50 percent of the 3 million students who begin college annually require some level of remediation. This trend costs students, parents, institutions, and taxpayers nearly $7 billion a year, while remedial students fail to earn a single college credit.

The high volume and costs of remediation have policymakers and education leaders scrambling to stop this financial hemorrhage. While reform in remedial education is inevitable, the unintended consequences of swooping changes can be harmful to students, institutions, and the economy at a time when the U.S. is struggling to fill the 21st century workforce with high-skilled workers.

Who are remediated students?

A report released today by the National Center on Education and the Economy states that many community college career programs demand little or no use of math, and high school students are taking math courses they will likely never use. In reading and writing, the group noted incoming college freshmen had simplistic and academically unchallenging skills. Finally, NCEE discovered that very little writing is required of community college freshmen, and when it is, there are low expectations for making a cogent argument and employing basic rules for writing, punctuation, and grammar. The report calls for the bar to be raised if students are to succeed in college, career, and life. Some of these same patterns exist for freshmen admitted to open admission four-year colleges.

Policymakers believe the solution to plugging up the remedial financial drain is to stop offering remedial classes in college, cut funding, or hold high schools accountable. Yet, these all-or-nothing solutions oversimplify who is entering remedial courses and how they got there. The spectrum of today’s remedial students includes:

• Nontraditional, returning students who’ve been out of school for years and need to brush up on learning skills while pursuing a degree or certificate.
• Students with undiagnosed learning disabilities.
• Low-income, minority, and first-generation students.
• Misplaced students who were misidentified as needing remedial classes.
  Multiple studies indicate up to 20 to 30 percent of remedial students are misidentified and don’t belong in developmental classes.
• Students who failed to master high school material due to a lack of focus, emotional/social maturity, home support, poor instruction, or a combination of these factors.

As funding plummets, remedial students still remain, as does the need to fill many of the 3.9 million U.S. job openings that require a college degree. Realizing remediation will be anything but a quick fix, many people and organizations are offering cost-saving strategies.

What does remedial reform look like?

Mike Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently argued that Pell grant funding — a need-based grant that helps qualifying students afford college — should not be available for students who require remedial education. Instead, he believes this $40 billion annual federal aid should only be awarded to students who take credit-bearing classes. The argument has merit. Statistically, the 35 percent of students who require remediation in four-year institutions complete a degree within six years, and worse, less than 10 percent of students enrolled in one or more developmental classes in community colleges graduate within three years.

Petrilli’s solution raises many questions. Is limiting college access to low-income students really a solution to remediation? Will high schools have the bandwidth to take accountability for the underprepared students who are denied grant-funding because they don’t possess basic skills? Are college-ready students more deserving of federal dollars than those who are underprepared for college?

Already, a recent change to Pell grants is negatively impacting developmental students. In the past, students were allowed to receive funding for up to 18 semesters. Now, they are limited to 12 semesters. For many students who work while going to school or are required to take several semesters of remedial education, this reduction in aid is a huge barrier to degree attainment.

Institutions, as well as people like Petrilli, are evaluating their best response to the remediation crisis. For example, in Ohio, only 25 percent of residents hold a college degree. The state hopes to improve the number of grads by adopting a new formula that aligns the amount of funding four-year colleges receive with the amount of graduates they produce. The community colleges are also seeing a shift to performance-based funding but not at as high a rate as four-year colleges. Like Ohio, more states than not have transitioned, are transitioning, or are discussing transitioning away from enrollment-based funding to performance-based funding.

Another solution for some states is to simply get rid of remedial funding. In addition to Ohio’s performance-based funding, the state government will start phasing out funding for remedial classes in the 2014-15 school year and completely end funding by 2020. In Connecticut, a bill attempted to cut remedial courses and put those students who would have been placed in a remedial courses in college-level, credit-earning courses. A bill was ultimately signed into law which allowed students to take one remedial course.

There are a number of different strategies being proposed by states and colleges to cut costs in remedial education. Until the pipeline to college improves, however, the need for remediation will remain. Without careful analysis of tradeoffs, cutting funding, courses, and opportunity is not reform: it is giving up and hoping someone else will pick up the slack. We need a holistic solution for the short and long term. As the NCEE stated in their report this morning:

“The logical conclusion might be for community colleges to raise their expectations and for high schools to step up the rigor… but that would not help today’s large proportion of high school graduates who do not meet the criteria to enroll in credit-bearing college courses.”

What are solutions which impact pipeline preparation before college?

Remediation may never be completely eradicated, but improvement can be made in the K-12 to college pipeline to better prepare students for college from the start.

Continue reading at The Huffington Post

As many as 1.7 million first-year students will take a remedial course to learn the math, reading, or writing skills they need to enroll in a credit-earning college-level course. Of all remedial courses most students are remediated in math skills. Due to a variety of factors — class dynamics, curricula, instruction,  skill-level, academic support, financial standing, life — retaining and passing students in a remedial course is a major concern.

Colorado Community College System conducted a longitudinal remedial math study that tracked remedial math students for 4 years. They found that though the majority of students required remedial math, math had the lowest pass rate of all remedial classes.

• Only 8% of students who enrolled in remedial math had graduated after four years
• Unlike the findings of a national study, the majority exited the sequence due to withdrawal or failure to pass a course, rather than completing and failing to enroll in the next course
• More than 40% of CCCS remedial math completers did not attempt college math

How can we equip these students with the tools to stick with and pass a remedial class? You’ll know from my blog earlier this week that ideally I believe more resources should be used at the K12-level to address learning difficulties before students graduate from high school and enter college. However, eliminating the need for remediation will not happen over night. What can we do today for the students who are graduating from high school with the dream of graduating from college, but who don’t have the skills to do so?

Academic Coaching promotes student accountability, motivation, and follow-through. It asks the student to not only do their homework, but to make a commitment to studying, getting a tutor, finding a support system, and passing the class. A faculty member with Academic Coaching skills asks the struggling developmental student powerful questions that puts the student in the driver’s seat of their own learning and asks them to invest in their own success.  LifeBound is at the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) Conference this week sharing the benefits of using Academic Coaching with developmental students with faculty from around the country. Today, Maureen Breeze is giving the session Academic Coaching for Hybrid, Online, and Self-Paced Math to train faculty to use academic coaching skills to inspire students to persevere and foster success in any level or mode of math class.

If you’re at the NADE conference is Denver, make sure to come say hello to LifeBound in the exhibit hall.

This week, Denver will be hosting the National Association for Developmental Education Conference.  This organization is made up of thousands of members who are dedicated to helping students who come to college without the skills required to enroll in a college-level course in math, reading or writing. As many as 1.7 million first-year students entering both two-year and four-year colleges will take a remedial course to learn the skills they need to enroll in a college-level course. Less than one-quarter of students attending a two-year college who take a remedial course will complete a college-level English or math class.¹

For many students who need to take remedial courses, they will be required to take up to three remedial courses per discipline before qualifying to enroll in a credit-earning class.² In some states, like Colorado, change is afoot.  Instead of offering three classes in math and three in English and reading, these classes will be collapsed into one class for each discipline.   Much of the learning will be self-paced at community colleges where the student to advisor ratio is 1500 to 1.³Â  Students will need to take initiative for their own learning, work with staff when they have questions they need answered and be accountable for their own personal improvement plans. These steps will provide a successful on ramp to other classes that are more challenging and require more rigor, self-discipline and collaboration with classmates once these basic requirements are met.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in partnership with Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Lumina Foundation and The Kresge Foundation are asking the developmental community to rethink how developmental math is taught, and they have an ambitious  goal to increase the percent of developmental students who earn credit for a college-level math class from 5 to 50 percent. The Carnegie Foundation knows that students who have a history of struggling in math classes will most likely continue to fail in math classes that mirror their past experiences of failure. That’s why they created two math improvement communities at the college-level: Statway and Quantway.

Statway is a one-year program designed for students transferring to degrees in humanities or social sciences which culminates to a college-level statistics class. Quantway similarly is a one-year course that culminates to a college-level quantitative math course. This course is different than your typical developmental math course in that it “will motivate and engage students with an innovative quantitative reasoning focus in which students use mathematics and numerical reasoning to make sense of the world around them.” The goal is to have students become “quantitatively literate students,” opposed to memorization machines.⁴

In Colorado, 1 in 5 students are in concurrent enrollment programs that allow the student to earn a high school diploma, while simultaneously earning an Associate’s Degree.⁵ Concurrent enrollment programs are appealing because they pay for two years of a student’s college education; encourage students to pursue 4-year degrees after graduation; and give high school students an opportunity to take remedial courses before moving on to college. On the other hand, a new report shows that the number of students taking remedial courses in a concurrent enrollment program grew 39.2 percent between the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school year.⁶ Concurrent enrollment programs are being used as a strategy to prepare more high school students with the basic skills they need before moving on to college. Though there is no argument that we need to prepare students to enter college while they’re still in high school, why isn’t there a focus on preparing students for college-level courses when they are in elementary, middle, and high school? Shouldn’t students be mastering high school classes in high school to prepare them for college courses, not mastering remedial college math courses while they’re still in high school?

While concurrent enrollment is a good idea for students who want to pursue the trades—careers in welding, auto mechanics, refrigeration, etc—it is a grave concern to me on other levels:

1. Where are the emotional and social skills that students need to mature so that they can succeed and thrive when they are in college?  If they are spending all of their time on college academics while they are in high school, what is the point of the community college?  How will they ever get the experience and maturity that they need to succeed personally and professionally?
2. The majority of concurrent enrollment classes take place at high schools, not on college campuses. Taking a college course down the hall from other high school courses fails to introduce students to college culture and expectations. Which is not to imply that more classes should be taught on college campuses. I’m all for high school students being on a college campus, but why not for summer enrichment, summer reading programs with experts or even college mentors and role models who can inspire and direct students?
3. Community colleges can barely keep up with the demand of returning students and displaced workers.  Now we are setting up a structure to engorge that system even further with high school students?
4. Why can’t we make high school more effective?  Why can’t we have more reading requirements, more activities that students join to build their professional skills, more ways to make high school a time where students prepare for the rigor and complexities of college, career and life?

Are we overemphasizing analytical and academic skills at the expense of the “soft” skills and experiences that students actually need to know themselves, understand what they are good at, be able to overcome challenges, think critically and creatively, and determine what makes them unique in the world?  If so, what is the short and long term cost?    Marching students through all of these courses does little to address the issues that they really struggle with on a personal level which, unadrressed,  absolutely stands in the way of their academic, personal, and professional success.

A discouraging fact is that many low-income U.S. students today lack the opportunity to study higher level mathematics in high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Data, there are close to 3,000 high schools serving nearly 500,000 students that fail to offer Algebra II or higher level math.  For these students, performance on college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT that include higher level algebra questions is negatively affected.

Success in Algebra II and beyond has been shown to be a strong indicator for college completion. For each level of completion from Algebra II, to trigonometry, to pre-calculus, to calculus, the chances of a student completing a bachelor’s degree increased by a factor of 2.59 to 1, and the students who simply complete a math course beyond Algebra II are twice as likely to complete a bachelor’s degree when enrolling in post-secondary education than a student who has not completed similar coursework. In an economy where access to and completion of higher education is critical, students who lack access to higher level math instruction are at disadvantage. As a nation, we must ensure that students today are able to take and successfully complete higher level courses to increase the number of educated, work-ready college graduates. 

Strong math skills don’t just help students get into and out of college, but they help them make better financial decisions, beginning with those that involve investments in higher education.

When students consider where to invest their dollars and time, they need the math skills to understand tuition costs and the time-value of money. They need to know how to read financial aid packages and calculate interest costs that are often confusing and packaged in misleading ways. And they need to be able to weigh these tuition and borrowing costs against the prospects for gainful employment to make sound decisions for their future. We as a nation need these students to make sound decisions for a more stable economy.

My book Dollars & Sense: How to Be Smart about Money helps teens distinguish between wants and needs, find higher education that fits their budget, and starts them on pathway to smart spending, investing, and saving. Find out more about getting your teen financially savvy before they make any big money mistakes.

When you visualize the 21^st century classroom, what do you see? A smartboard on the front wall, iPads in every student’s hands, individualized learning programs on the computer, setting the pace of a lesson while a teacher stands by for questions…

Some classrooms have moved into the digital age, however, the 21^st century classroom is more commonly described as overcrowded and underfunded. The student demographic is diverse with disabled, gifted, English language, impoverished, and enriched learners. Teachers are faced with having to teach to all levels of the classroom, and due to lack of time, resources, and bandwidth, they teach to the students in the middle; often leaving those who are falling behind behind and those who are gifted unchallenged.

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released the report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” inspired by “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”[i] This report, though controversial, did bring to light educational issues we are still fighting today.

The following are some noteworthy statistics from the 1983 report:

• · Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.
• · The number and proportion of students demonstrating superior achievement on the SATs have dramatically declined.
• · Many 17-year-olds do not possess the “higher order” intellectual skills we should expect from them.
• · There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of the U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973, and 1977.
• · Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in public 4-year colleges increased by 72 percent.
• · Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.

Sound familiar? Three decades later, minorities are trending toward becoming the majority, while the achievement gap continues to grow; college students are graduating with weak critical thinking skills; students’ competency in STEM subjects aren’t keeping up with the amount of job openings in STEM fields; and teachers are now said to come from the bottom one-third of their class.[ii]

[i] “A Nation at Risk” By The National Commission on Excellence in Education

[ii] “Achievement Gap” http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/

Since the 1980s, more women than men have been attending college. Since 1996, more women have been attending and graduating from college.¹ A study in 2008 found the male to female ratio for attending college was 43.6 and 56.4, respectively. The gender gap in education continues to widen in favor of women, but why?

The 2011 PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) found a consistent difference between girls’ and boys’ academic achievement in most countries.  Fourth grade girls have a much higher average reading achievement than boys, and their 2011 results continue to show this pattern. In the United States, recent research found that girls had an advantage in reading at all grades, from kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Another study conducted by PISA in 2009 showed that 15-year-old girls performed consistently better in reading than boys.³

In Richard Whitmire’s, “Why Boys Fail,”⁴ he shares the following stats to show the academic gap between boys and girls:

• The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.
• Boys are twice as likely to get suspended as girls, and three times as likely to be expelled. Estimates of dropouts vary, but it seems that about one-quarter more boys drop out than girls.
• Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.
• In federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent.

What is causing boys to fall behind? The most widely acknowledged theory is that the K-12 classroom is more favorable to girls. “The world has gotten more verbal. Boys haven’t,” says Whitmire. He argues that the root cause of boys falling behind at school is that the teaching methods aren’t designed to engage the minds of boys. Boredom is an all too familiar side effect of classroom teaching, which leads to frustration and causes boys to showcase behavioral problems and/or dislike going to school.

“Girls use more words. They are heavy on reading and early literacy and more social cooperation,” says author and behavioral psychologist Anthony Rao in the article, “New UGA Study: Their Classroom Demeanors Give Girls a Boost in Grades Over Boys in Classroom.”^5 The same article also lists that boys commonly display worse behavior than girls, which can cause teachers to assign higher grades to girls over boys.

Is there a remedy for this problem? Is the problem academic, social, emotional, or all of the above?

LifeBound’s books are written with the complex world of students in mind. People Smarts for Teenagers asks students to examine boundaries with their peers, strengthen their emotional intelligence, and prepare them with tools they need to be academically successful. Gifts & Talents for Teenagers helps teens start aligning their interests, passions, and strengths into higher education or career choices. Students need a framework that shows what they do in the classroom has applications in the real world.

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Sources:
¹Why Are Women More Interested in Going to College Than Men?” http://www.good.is/posts/why-are-women-more-interested-in-going-to-college-than-men
²PIRLS 2011 International Results in Reading,” <ahref=”http://timss.bc.edu/pirls2011/downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf”>http://timss.bc.edu/pirls2011/downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf
³ New Reading Standards Aim to Prep Kids for College But at What Cost, “http://www.npr.org/2013/01/19/169798643/new-reading-standards-aim-to-prep-kids-for-college-but-at-what-cost”
⁴“The Boys Have Fallen Behind,”http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=0

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/

⁵ New UGA Study: Their Classroom Demeanors Give Girls a Boost in Grades Over Boys in Classroom

The ability to write well is meant to evolve naturally from a few simple sentences on a first-grader’s notebook to the polished draft of a senior paper, and when it does the entire school experience tends to proceed naturally as well. In the workforce, good writing is the hallmark of a professional that can express himself clearly and display one’s company/product in an attractive way. This has only become more true in today’s world, where email, text messaging, and social media have taken over many of the communications that used to be performed by phone or in person.

In fact, the changing role of writing in the world today has many teachers wondering how they should adapt their teaching to make it more relevant to today’s writing needs, personally and professionally. Susan Lucille Davis, a writing teacher with over 30 years of experience, expresses this question in her blog, “Teaching Authentic Writing in a Socially Mediated World,” but admits that she herself doesn’t have the whole answer. She and many of her colleagues agree, however, that the answer would need to address and prove relevant towards improving writing in the following categories:

• Text messages to friends/colleagues.
• Captions for photos that express important information.
• Questions that probe and dig for what matters.
• Status updates that share a mood or point of view.
• Comments on interactive websites that continue the conversation.
• Product reviews that are convincing and detailed.
• Emails written with the appropriate tone and length.
• Collaborative documentation online, which requires more than simply dividing the work.
• Tweets that add valuable insight to an online conversation.
• Blogs that allow ideas and information to percolate over time.
• Citizen journalism that is current and relevant.
• Storyboards and scripts for the many different types of videos being made today.
• Proposals to make, do, or change something.
• Process analyses that help examine the way things work.
• Syntheses that help organize disparate resources and media.
• Reflections that share transparently and probe thoughtfully.

This rather daunting list points out a clear gap between traditional writing education and the evolution of writing needs in the world today. At the same time, it makes clear just how important writing skills have become in a world where every individual is a user and a maker, a consumer and a producer. The role of writing has expanded to the point where there’s hardly a place left in American society for someone who isn’t fluent in text.

Recent statistics support this idea. According to various studies cited by Gene A. Budig in his article, “Studies Show the Importance of Writing Skills,” 8 out of 10 parents believe writing is more important now than it was 20 years ago. 86% of teens believe that good writing predicts future success, and 82% express a wish to write better and for teachers to address the topic more in their classrooms. The highest percentage of teens who believed this came from minority and low-income groups.

We don’t need a study to know trends in technology have expanded the role writing plays in our lives. People of all demographics and ages text, instant message, and email every day — many times a day. We’ve hung up on using verbal communication, and turned to the more convenient, efficient, and, arguably, most unsocial mode of communication: writing.

That doesn’t mean we are all better writers for it. We’ve seen the birth of textlish, like LOL, BRB, YOLO, which has become so standard in the English language that it crossed over into verbal communication. Twenty-first century writers come with autocorrect, which knows what you want to say faster than you can type it (sometimes). Social media has unveiled our friends that don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re. Writing may be more prominent in our daily tasks, but it doesn’t mean the art and craft of writing, critical thinking, grammar or self reflection has become more prominent with it.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/05/record-shares-of-young-adults-have-finished-both-high-school-and-college/4/#section-3-high-school-completion-among-young-adults

More U.S. students are graduating from high school and college than ever before, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. The increase in grads can be attributed in large to our changed economy. Since the 2007 recession, students have been drilled on the importance of having an education in order to land a job in a highly competitive job market. Adults have also returned to school to gain higher pay, change careers, or increase their level of education after a layoff.

The Pew Research Center analysis found:

• 90% of young adults (ages 25-29) in the U.S. have a high school education.
• 63% of young adults (ages 25-29) in the U.S. have completed at least some college.

The analysis also found significant changes in college populations over the last 30 years. In the 1970s:

• 36% of Americans said a college education is “very important.” (1978)
• 17% of the college-age population were non-white. (1971)

In the 2000s:

• 75% of Americans said a college education is “very important.” (2010)
• 44% of the college-age population is non-white. (2012)

Though the growing and diversifying population of high school and college grads are stabilizing us at home, experts question if it will be enough to keep our position as a global leader in higher education. Many developed countries are simultaneously working toward becoming a global power in higher education, and have a faster annual growth rate for graduates than the U.S.

As long as we keep growing minds in this knowledge-based economy, we can keep our edge and compete with other developed countries for the best innovators, jobs, schools, and teachers. As we prepare more students for the world of work than ever before, we also need to help them find their uniqueness in an evermore competitive and global workforce. We must emphasis entrepreneurial, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. We must help students fuse the gap between high school or college graduation and a career. Now that we have more students dedicated to earning an education, we must work to give all equal access to the best education and help them make connections between their education and the rest of their lives.

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Sources:

“Record Shares of Young Adults Have Finished Both High School and College,” By Richard Fry and Kim Parker. 5 November 2012. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/05/record-shares-of-young-adults-have-finished-both-high-school-and-college/#overview