National Center for Education StatisticsJune 2004
The National Center for Education Statistics publishes several annual compilations that belong on the shelves of all card-carrying education policy wonks. The most interesting of them is the Condition of Education report, which changes every year because the NCES team selects different indicators and analyzes and interprets them rather than settling for "just-the-facts." This 325-pager is the latest such, and the first under the expert leadership of NCES Commissioner Robert Lerner. It's worth your time (at least if you're a policy wonk) because some of the special analyses are uncommonly illuminating and because Lerner avoids the traps that some of his predecessors slipped into, such as "spinning" the data a bit too hard on behalf of the administration they served. (A couple of Clinton-era COE's were egregious in this regard). You'll find all sorts of fascinating stuff here, such as :
- Seventy-one percent of all U.S. college students received financial aid in 2000, up from 54 percent in 1990, but the growth in grant aid didn't offset the rise in tuitions. Which helps account for the fact that 45 percent of college students took out Stafford loans in 2000 (up from 30 percent a decade earlier).
- "Schools in the Southeast were more likely to have pre-kindergarten programs and full-day programs than schools in other regions of the country."
- In 2003, 13 percent "of all persons ages 16-24 were neither enrolled in school nor working," down from 16 percent in 1986.
- By 2001, the U.S. had fallen below the OECD average in its rate of first-time entry of young people into colleges at the bachelor's degree (or higher) level. Considering that, as NCES laconically puts it, such rates "provide an indication of the degree to which a country's population is acquiring higher-level skills and knowledge," this is an alarming development. (The calculation is complicated, but the OECD average in 2001 was 47 [up from 40 in 1998], the U.S. rate was 42 [down from 44], England's was 45, Norway's 62, Spain's 48, Italy's 44.)
- There is modest but real growth in the proportion of students enrolled in "public schools of choice"; 15.4 percent in 2003 vs. 11 a decade earlier. During that same period, private school enrollments rose from 9.1 percent of the total to 10.8.
There's plenty more here so poke around on your own. This can be done on-line (start here with a helpful website that integrates the COE reports from 2000 through 2004) but, because of the document's bulk, you may prefer to obtain a hard copy, which you can do by calling 1-877-4ED-PUBS.
