Skills Beyond School: The OECD Reports on American Higher Education

On July 10, The New America Foundation hosted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for the launch of a major new assessment of higher education in the United States. The OECD report provides an important outsider’s perspective, on challenges to America’s global standing in postsecondary education outcomes and what lawmakers could and should do to address them. 

The report recommends building on the unique strengths of the American postsecondary system and also makes clear that until decades-old problems of quality, coherence, and transparency are addressed, the United States will not continue to lead the world in postsecondary outcomes. 

The OECD’s paper serves as the American country report for its Skills Beyond School project, which focuses on the most rapidly growing segment of U.S. higher education, Career and Technical Education (CTE). Research shows that a decade from now one in three American jobs will require a CTE qualification, but the report finds that rising tuition costs, widely varying quality standards, and the growth of for-profit and online alternatives have introduced sizeable risks and complexities into the American higher education market. Using examples from U.S. states and other OECD countries, the report makes recommendations that could benefit CTE programs and higher education as a whole. 

A presentation of the OECD’s findings and a series of expert panels that examine the implications of the report’s themes of quality, coherence, and transparency for our nation’s higher education system and economic prosperity are collected here.