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製作日期:2012.9.21

3. Smart, Uneducated Kids

In 1900, only 6.4 percent of Americans of the appropriate age group graduated from high school. By 1960, 60 percent of Americans were graduating from high school, almost ten times the rate of only sixty years earlier. This rate peaked at about 80 percent in the late 1960s and since then has fallen by about six percentage points. In other words, earlier in the twentieth century, a lot of potential geniuses didn’t get much education, but rather they were literally “kept down on the farm.” Taking a smart, motivated person out of an

isolated environment and sending that person to high school will bring big productivity gains. We’ve sent more people to college as well. In 1900, only one in four hundred Americans went to college, but in 2009, 40 percent of 18-24-year-olds were enrolled in college. We won’t be able to replicate that kind of gain over the next century, and on college completion rates, we are moving backward in some important regards.

In contrast to earlier in the twentieth century, who today is the marginal student thrown into the college environment? It is someone who cannot write a clear English sentence, perhaps cannot read well, and cannot perform all the functions of basic arithmetic. About one-third of the college students today will drop out, a marked rise since the 1960s, when the figure was only one in five. At the two hundred schools with the worst graduation rates, only 26 percent of the students will finish. The typical individual in these schools-much less the marginal individual—is someone who struggled in high school and never

was properly prepared. It also may be a student who, whatever his or her underlying talent level may be, comes from a broken and possibly tragic home environment and simply is not ready to take advantage of college.

Educating many of these students is possible, it is desirable, and we should do more of it, but it is not like grabbing low-hanging fruit. It’s a long, tough slog with difficult obstacles.