Looking through Obama's web site for his program for the middle class, I found this claim (after clicking out of what for me was the premature video plea to join him):
[O]ur share of twenty-four-year-olds with college degrees now falls somewhere between Bulgaria and Costa Rica.
Really? I found this surprising. Since the GI Bill, the U.S. has democratized college attendance. For decades, we have led the world in percentage of college graduates in every rising age cohort. When did it change? What's his source?
Unlike John Edwards's campaign site, Obama's doesn't have any citations at all. Alas, what I thought were my exceptional Google skills haven't found a satisfactory answer. I did find three items that bear on this:
- Remarks (pdf - see p. 7) from Austan Goolsbee, a Chicago School of Business economist, that appear to be Obama's source (and make clear that Obama's "somewhere" is needlessly vague)
- NSF statistics from 2003 about college grads in the workforce, particularly this part of Table 4:
- A very old (1990) article that incidentally provides stats about the annual cohort of graduates
There's something between the latter two bullets that doesn't make sense. American higher ed is producing roughly a million graduates a year, as stated by the old article and confirmed historically by the NSF table.
And that makes me question the data I still haven't found that Goolsbee is alluding to.The graduation rate of a million per year means that there should be between 5 and 7 million graduates 29 or younger. This assumes that most people graduate before age 30 and that the vast majority of graduates are citizens, but those seem like pretty safe assumptions. Where are the missing grads, then?
It is true that these age cohorts have increased in size without a corresponding college building boom. In percentage terms, of course this matters.
But, unfortunately, to really understand this and its public policy implications, I need more information. Any reporter out there want to
ask the Obama campaign or
Goolsbee? Nah, didn't think so.
Update: Found the missing grads! The NSF, inexplicably,
wasn't looking for them! The survey was designed to look for graduates whose degrees had been granted
more than three years before.
I'd still like to see the full international table of degree rates.
Update: Anonymous "goolsbee" provides
the goods.
