Many of those unskilled applicants are college graduates, not high school dropouts. Like much of the rest of American education, the nation's colleges and universities appear to live by an unconscious educational rule of thumb that their function is to weed out, not to cultivate, students for whom they have accepted responsibility. An unacceptably high percentage of students leaks out of the system at each juncture in the education pipeline. This hemorrhaging of our human resources occurs despite the low standards prevalent in American education and the existence of a wide diversity of institutions offering many options for students. It is almost as though educators take failure for granted.
Education is in trouble, and with it our nation's hopes for the future.
America's ability to compete in a global economy is threatened. The American people's hopes for a civil, humane society ride on the outcome. The capacity of the United States to shoulder its responsibilities on the world stage is at risk. All of these things are true. But the larger truth is that the explanations, no matter how persuasive they once were, no longer add up to a compelling whole.