Paul Barton, Educational Testing Service
September 2002
You may have trouble picturing the Educational Testing Service in the guise of Frederick Jackson Turner, but this 24 page policy paper by the astonishingly prolific Paul Barton does pose an interesting question: should America be worried by the fact that, while we've been fussing with education quality over the past quarter century, the QUANTITY of education received by Americans, taken as a whole and averaged across groups, has leveled off for the first time in our history? He shows that neither high school nor college completion rates have risen in decades and asks whether this is a problem that should concern us. He clearly thinks it is and should. So do I, considering how many other lands now surpass us in college enrollment and completion rates. The policy steps Barton urges do not involve any weakening of the effort to boost academic standards. One must wonder, though, whether his readers will maintain the same degree of attention to education quality while devising ways of tackling the problem of quantity. What we don't need is renewed growth in meaningless diplomas and degrees. We may even have to face a period in which those rates decline a bit as they come to mean more than they recently have. In any case, this important tradeoff will be clearer to you if you make the acquaintance of Barton's provocative argument. You can find it at http://www.ets.org/research/pic/frontier.pdf. For a look at how Massachusetts is handling this painful tradeoff, see "State predicts drop in graduates," by Michele Kurtz and Anand Vaishnav, The Boston Globe, October 10, 2002, http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/283/metro/State_predicts_drop_in_graduates+.shtml.
