America has served as a world leader in college education for many decades. However, since the early 1990s, the number of college dropouts has been on the rise. Mark Schneider, author of The Cost of Failure in American Higher Education and Vice-President of American Institute for Research, describes the low graduate rates, “The median high school graduation rate, for example, is 77% but the median post-secondary graduation rate is more than 25 points lower. While American high school graduates about three-fourths of their students in 4 years, American colleges graduate only half of their students in six.”

The new book, Crossing the Finish Line, addresses the problems that are resulting in low college graduation rates. The book is authored by William Bowen (economist and former Princeton president) and Michael McPherson (economist and former Macalester College president). New York Times describes the book’s essential message, “Precollege education is a problem. But high schools still produce many students who have the skills to complete college and yet fail to do so. Turning them into college graduates should be a lot less difficult than fixing all of the American education.”

Crossing the Finish Line attributes 3 main problems that led to these low graduation rates.

1. Under-Matching – Many students are choosing not to attend the best college that they can get in to. They are choosing the school most convenient to them, whether it is because of location or for financial reasons. Author Bowen says that when students under-match it’s really a waste of their full potential and a big problem for our country. The book points out that in order to lift the graduation rate significantly then it must be lifted among the poor and working-class students. Instead, it appears to have dramatically fallen in this category of students.

2. Failure is acceptable. – Money isn’t the only issue when factoring the low graduation rates. America is facing a deeper cultural problem in which failure is becoming acceptable. Many students are not seeing a need to graduate in 4 years anymore. There’s the idea that graduating in 4 years is like leaving the party early which in turn results in graduation delayed becoming graduation denied.

3. Freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen. – Colleges are not necessarily losing out when upperclassmen drop out or decide to prolong their stay. Large lecture halls for freshmen are cheaper than seminars for upperclassmen. Therefore, when a college allows many of its upperclassmen to drop out, it probably is helping them out financially.

But there is hope… The Obama administration is teaming up with Congress to put together a new bill to deal with this problem, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The proposed bill would cancel about $9 billion in annual government subsidies for banks that lend to college students and use the money to increase financial aid. In addition, a portion of the money would be set aside for pilot programs aimed at lifting the number of college graduates.

America really needs help with graduating their college students has this may turn into a long term problem. For example, the gap between what a college graduate earned and what everyone else earned reached a record high last year. Workers with a bachelor’s degree earned 54% more on average than those who attended college but didn’t finish according to reports released by the United States Department of Labor.