Michael Crow, Arizona State University president and CEOs for Cities partner, wrote an op-ed piece about the state of higher education in the US that recently appeared in the Washington Post. Education is critical to the prosperity of America because it forges the path for new innovations according to Crow. He states, "Following the Second World War, our nation emerged to lead the world in educational attainment, and from there led the way to scientific discovery, new business start-ups, new industrial sectors like biotech, pioneering military preparedness, and astonishing feats of human creativity and technological genius, like landing humans on the moon or creating an Internet economy." Increasing the nation's college attainment rate by one percentage point would realize a Talent Dividend of $124 billion in additional personal income annually. The global economy is changing. As David Rosen cited in July 2009, "Three-quarters of the workers that were fired over the last year were let go on a permanent, not a temporary basis." Making higher education accessible to all will allow us to retool and reeducate our workforce to retain America's competitiveness.
↧
