Dive Summary:
- On Tuesday, nearly 500 public four-year colleges and universities, as well as their associations, pledged to increase their number of bachelor's degrees awarded to 3.8 million by 2025 to meet President Obama's ambitious "completion agenda" goals.
- The plan, titled "Project Degree Completion," is a collaboration between The American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, whose members include almost all of the nation's four-year public institutions, and a big chunk of the projected gain is planned to come from reaching out to former students who left without a degree.
- In a statement, the institutions involved acknowledged meeting this goal would be difficult without the return of strong state and federal financial support, as many of the schools have had to increase tuition to compensate for reduced funding.
From the article:
Given that they enroll more than a third of all undergraduates in the United States, public four-year colleges and universities will have to pick up their game in a big way if the country has any chance at all of meeting the ambitious goals that President Obama and his co-conspirators in the "completion agenda" have set for increasing postsecondary attainment. And on Tuesday, nearly 500 of them -- and their associations -- pledged to do just that, vowing to increase by 3.8 million the number of bachelor's degrees they award by 2025. ...