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More bad news for U.S. education
September 13, 2005

Despite spending more per student per year on education than any other country but Switzerland, the U.S. (at $11,152 per student vs. Switzerland's $11,334) is losing ground: it ranks seventh (tied with Belgium) among industrialized nations in the percentage of people aged 25 to 34 who hold a college degree. Twenty years ago, the U.S. ranked first.

That's one finding of a study conducted by the 30-nation, Paris-based Organization for Cooperation and Development, as reported in the Boston Globe. The study also found that 15-year-olds in the U.S., compared with their peers elsewhere, are below average in applying math skills to real-life tasks.

The Globe article quotes Barry McGaw, the organization's director of education, as saying that the U.S. remains atop the "knowledge economy," but he adds that education's contribution is weakening, and the U.S. "ought to be worrying."


Posted by Rick Nelson on September 13, 2005 | Comments (1)


October 5, 2005
In response to: More bad news for U.S. education
norgotoad commented:

My nephew asked me why go through the expense and effort of getting a college degree just to join the army or work at Wal Mart. Or maybe...just maybe if he is really really lucky, get into sales. Wow! Nice future we're handing to our kids. We are keeping the Wal Mart jobs and exporting the engineering and computer science jobs. So why get a degree? I have two graduate degrees, one from an Ivy, but I couldn't come up with a good answer. Neither could conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts, a Hoover Fellow, when asked the same question by his 19 year old son. So this is what we want? Now that's crazy.





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