The all-too-familiar narrative of racial and ethnic gaps in educational attainment will persist well into the 21st century unless “targeted and tailored” strategies are implemented for various underrepresented groups. That is the message of a forthcoming Educational Testing Service (ETS) report titled “Challenges and Opportunities in Achieving the National Postsecondary Degree Attainment Goals.”
The groundbreaking report is authored by Dr. Michael T. Nettles, senior vice president at ETS and chair of the organization’s Policy Evaluation & Research Center, or PERC. It is the first to disaggregate data in order to forecast precisely when and how various groups within the United States will reach national degree attainment goals set by the Lumina Foundation and federalized under the Obama administration in 2009.
The federal goal calls for 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 to have earned a two- or four-year college degree by 2020. The Lumina goal is similar and calls for 60 percent of Americans ages 25 to 64 to have a post-secondary credential, which could include high-quality certificates, with labor market value by 2025.
The ETS report’s findings show that several minority groups will not only fail to reach these educational benchmarks by the target dates, but will fail to do so for many years to come without effective interventions.
“National college attainment goals are a great step towards preparing our country’s citizens for the contemporary workforce,” says Nettles. “However, known inequities need to be part of the discussion, which is why we included in our investigation college attainment projections by race and gender.”
Dr. Stella M. Flores, associate professor of higher education and director of access and equity at the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at New York University, says the report is a “necessary acknowledgment and attests to why we need to disaggregate data along an educational continuum that extends into employment sectors to more accurately understand the nature of the problem of underrepresentation.”
She adds, “While a focus on employment should not be the only goal for higher education, recognizing it as a necessary incentive and metric in the overall benefits of higher educational attainment is important and now a mainstay of how we look at our progress as a nation.”
