Back to Work - Bill Clinton [41]
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On food insecurity, measuring the percentage of people who didn’t have enough money at some time in the last year to buy food, only twenty countries reported. The United States tied with South Korea for the highest percentage in need at 16 percent.
Our highest positive ranking on this list is eleventh, on Gallup’s Global Wellbeing Index, which measures the percentage of people thriving in the United States at 57 percent, well below Denmark’s top ranking at 82 percent.
On comparative tests, U.S. students ranked sixteenth in science, twenty-second in math. Our high school graduation rate is eighteenth, as the next chart shows. Our problems in kindergarten through twelfth-grade education are well known. In elementary school, our kids match up well with others. By the eighth grade, there’s a pretty wide gap between our students and those in the highest-scoring countries. By the eleventh grade, the gap has grown into a chasm. Though our best students continue to do reasonably well compared with other nations’ best students, we also have a higher percentage of low-performing students than they do.4,5
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An even more troubling development for our long-term economic health is the trend that can be seen in the next chart. It shows our ranking, compared with other wealthy countries, in college-graduation rates. In 1995, the United States still led the world. By 2009, while we ranked third in 55- to 64-year-olds with college degrees, we ranked sixteenth in 25- to 34-year-olds with them. This shift happened because other countries improved their graduation rates over the last decade and we didn’t. America is still at or near first in the world in the percentage of our young people who start college, but our dropout rate is higher, probably because of a decade in which incomes were flat or declining and the cost of college increased 75 percent.
I hope the Obama administration’s student-loan program will correct much of this trend. Under the new system, the federal government will lend the money directly to students, instead of guaranteeing bank loans. That will lower student-loan costs. The students also don’t need to be afraid of running up debt to get a degree, because their loans can be paid off over twenty years as a small, fixed percentage of income. That means once the program is fully implemented, no one will ever have to drop out of college again because of the cost. The new program will cost the government $60 billion less than the old system over a decade, $40 billion of which will go to increase Pell Grants and other student aid and work programs, with the remaining $20 billion used to reduce the debt.
If you’re skeptical that this system will save money, don’t be. During my administration, the Education Department gave colleges the option of using this system. It saved students $9 billion, an average of $1,300 in repayment costs on every $10,000 borrowed, and saved the taxpayers $4 billion, because once the students were able to repay their loans, almost no one defaulted.
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