The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign upwards for our weekly newsletters to become stories like this delivered direct to your inbox.

U.S. education ranking
Students at Tokyo National College of Applied science examination their handmade diodes in a laboratory. (Photo by Blaine Harden)

America'due south universities take long had a reputation for existence the best in the globe—a truth so apparently self-evident that it'due south rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation's 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers?

Indeed, in that location'south lots of evidence that American higher pedagogy could be doing significantly meliorate. But how?

It'south a question The Hechinger Report set out to reply by visiting countries on 3 continents and examining their new higher-education agendas.

As President Barack Obama has noted time and over again, the U.Due south. has slipped from commencement to 16th in the globe when information technology comes to the percent of our population aged 25-34 with postsecondary credentials. We're at 41 pct, or most two out of every v young adults, co-ordinate to the latest information from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development—and this despite the huge cost of U.S. higher education to families and taxpayers.

Lessons From Abroad

This story is part of The Hechinger Report's ongoing series on what the U.S. can learn from higher pedagogy in other countries.

Read the rest of the serial and keep upwardly on ongoing news on our blog.

Earth champion South korea is at 63 pct. Canada—with which the Us shares a border, still which fares far improve in this international ranking—is tied with Nihon for second. Fifty-6 percent of Canadian and Japanese young people agree degrees. Russia follows, in fourth, at 55 percent. So what'due south going on?

Yes, the U.S. is home to Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale, along with top-rated M.I.T. and Stanford. And yep, the U.S. boasts 17 of the top 20 universities in the world, according to the most recent Bookish Ranking of World Universities past Shanghai Jiao Tong Academy.

Yet these institutions enroll a thin slice of America's twenty 1000000 college students. Far more attend two- and iv-year colleges, both public and private, of often-questionable quality.

And for every U.S. student who graduates, two drop out. Almost 80 percent of those who enroll in community colleges never cease what they showtime.

The United States is facing a projected shortfall of 16 million college-educated adults in the American workforce by 2025 if information technology doesn't alter the rate at which information technology produces college graduates. Young Americans today will brand history for being the first generation ever to be less educated, and to earn less and live less comfortably, than their parents.

With the country on the cusp of a double-dip recession, millions remain unemployed and leading thinkers are suggesting that the 21st century belongs to Red china and India, not America.

Why? We hear again and again that it's because America fell comatose at the bike.

Our series, "Lessons From Abroad," tells the story of a in one case-dominant nation in danger of being left behind. We invite you to be a office of the give-and-take, as information technology unfolds over the coming months on this site, in The Washington Post and in other national outlets. The Hechinger Report will turn its attention to higher education in Mainland china, India, Japan and South Korea, as well as Canada, Peachy United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and Ireland. Blaine Harden reports on Japan in today's Washington Post. Our promise is to spark a national chat virtually higher education that continues well across our coverage.

In their new book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum explain both the opportunities and the challenges facing the United states of america:

"To prosper, America has to educate its young people up to and beyond the new levels of technology … we need our educational activity system not only to strengthen anybody'south basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic—but to teach and inspire all Americans to start something new, to add something extra, or to suit something old in whatsoever job they are doing. With the world getting more hyper-connected all the fourth dimension, maintaining the American dream will require learning, working, producing, relearning, and innovating twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as oftentimes, and twice as much" (emphasis in the original).

Our series attempts to showcase the vital lessons to be learned well-nigh how other countries get more of their students to and through college than the United States does. What works in college education elsewhere? How are other countries increasing access and success amid historically underrepresented groups? How are they maintaining quality without increasing costs, while also focusing on what students actually learn and are able to do?

More than specifically, how has China doubled its higher-education participation in just the concluding decade—attracting students who one time came to the United States for college—and how does it educate a quarter of the world's students with just two per centum of the global education budget? How has Canada increased attainment rates and integrated immigrants and native populations into its higher-teaching system? How has Ireland created strong linkages between its K-12 and higher-didactics systems?

And the most important question of all: For America to avert catastrophe and regain both its educational border and economic dominance, how—and how urgently—must U.S. college pedagogy change?

The Hechinger Study provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on educational activity that is free to all readers. But that doesn't hateful it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing bug at schools and on campuses throughout the state. We tell the whole story, fifty-fifty when the details are inconvenient. Help u.s.a. keep doing that.

Bring together us today.

Justin Snider is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report. He is an assistant dean at Columbia University, where he also teaches undergraduate writing. Previously, Snider taught high-schoolhouse English...

Liz Willen, a longtime instruction journalist, has led the award-winning Hechinger Report staff as editor in chief since 2011. A sought-after moderator of education conferences and events, Willen also writes... More by Liz Willen