Very sad indeed — here’s John Merrifield:
I discovered this in an unpublished manuscript at my annual economics conference: “According to Harrigan and Davies, between 1987 to 2007, 90% of the increased comparative value of a college degree came from the declining performance of high schools rather than the increasing performance of colleges; in essence, higher education has become more valuable because high school education has become exceedingly less valuable by comparison.” And that is despite the tripling in per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, in the last fifty years.
Students and families now need to spend big bucks on higher education to get them just past where they could have been with high school effectiveness at the “Nation at Risk” level of the early 1980’s!
Read more: EducationBlog.NCPA.org
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