With public spending rising to pay costs of our aging population, and with enormous current military expenditures, there is not much discussion of other public spending needs.  Yet with the children of the baby boom generation swelling the ranks of those in college, and with a college degree ever more essential for a decent job, we need to focus on our public universities and colleges.

A new research paper by John Bound of the University of Michigan and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia draws attention to the dangers of neglecting public colleges.  In “Cohort Crowding: How Resources Affect Collegiate Attainment,” Bound and Turner ask this question: what happens to college completion rates when pressure mounts on the capacity of public colleges?  They answer this question by looking at the effect on graduation rates across states since 1950 in response to variation in the number of young people. 

Bound and Turner first establish that states are slow to add or remove capacity in universities in response to changes in the size of the college-age population.  They also dismiss the idea that students in larger or smaller cohorts are somehow differently prepared for college.  So when they find that an increase of 10 percent in the size of the college age population can be expected to reduce by 4 percent the proportion of that group of young people who end up graduating from college, they identify a real problem of “crowding out” of potential college graduates.  A kid with the bad luck to be born in a year with a lot of other babies has a worse chance than his sister, who is born into a smaller cohort, to finish college.

The authors find that the top schools in the public university system are the least likely to adjust their admissions numbers.  But these also are the schools with the highest graduation rates.  So being a member of a big group of young people makes it harder to get into any given university and makes it more likely that a student will attend a college with a low graduation rate.

Beyond the need to increase the resources devoted to public colleges and universities for larger cohorts, Bound and Turner’s research draws attention to the basic need to increase the nation’s capacity to provide higher education for Americans.  They show that since the Second World War, a simple truth holds: when we increase the resources devoted to tertiary education, we graduate a larger proportion of the population; when we scrimp, fewer young people graduate.  This seemingly obvious point often is denied by those who say results do not respond to spending. 

A hundred years ago, when only an elite finished high school, many people thought it would be wasteful to expand the secondary school system.  Yet in the first half of the 20th century, the idea took hold in America that a high school education was not something just for the best and brightest.  Everyone needed to go to high school to acquire skills for the developing economy.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had become the world leader in education, achieving nearly universal secondary education decades before most of the other advanced economies.

In the new century, we need to become the first country to provide universal tertiary education.  Bound and Turner have shown that college attendance and completion is sensitive to available resources.  We need to increase opportunities to attend good public colleges and universities by investing in this infrastructure.  More than this, we need to innovate in the variety of programs we offer and the preparation we provide.  We owe this to our children and to ourselves.

Bernard Wasow is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.