For years, the Bush administration’s education policy has focused  on leaving “no child behind” in K-12 education. What it didn’t consider were the problems those children might face once they became college freshman.

The U.S. ranks second only to Canada in college degree completion among an older generation, those aged 35 to 64, according to the 2006 National Report Card on Higher Education. Thirty-nine percent of those American adults hold a college degree.

That rate stalled as the country moved into the 21st century — and the rest of the world sped forward. Six countries report completion rates of 40 percent or more, dropping the U.S. ranking of the next American generation, those aged 25 to 34, to a tied seventh.

And the report expects the situation to get worse.

“The inescapable fact is that the United States is underperforming in higher education,” the report said.

As higher education around the world evolves, policymakers are struggling to play a game of catch-up to stay competitive in what is becoming a more educated world. Yet, in the face of hot-button issues like the economy and the war, higher education has been widely ignored by the two major presidential candidates in both debates and discussion of policy.

The first time either candidate discussed the issue in a public forum was during the closing question of last week’s debate at Hofstra University in New York, at the prompting of moderator Bob Schieffer.

While both candidates acknowledged the importance of the issue in national policy — Barack Obama linked the decline of education in America with the decline in the economy, saying they need to improve together, and John McCain called it the “civil rights issue” of the 21st century — neither provided a clear idea of where they stood moving forward.

Shanan Glandz, a board member of IC Republicans and a columnist for The Ithacan, said higher education issues have gotten only “the vaguest play” between the two most prominent presidential candidates, whose platforms center mostly around general pledges toward education.

She said she thinks the issue has been underplayed in this election because historically, college students have shown up inconsistently, and insecurely, to the polls.

In this election, that could change. U.S. News and World Report released a study showing a 135 percent increase in young voter participation in the presidential primaries, and the Harvard Institute of Politics’ 2008 Polling Update, released yesterday, reported 56 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 said they will “definitely vote” in the upcoming election.  

Louis Soares, the director of the Economic Mobility Program for the Center for American Progress, said if these students act as “consumers” of education, they will add a voice to discussions about policy changes that, until now, have been noticeably absent.

“People are starting college but they’re not finishing — and in some ways that makes sense,” he said. “We haven’t really started taking a look at policies that make it more likely that people are going to successfully complete their degree.”

The Higher Education Opportunity Act, signed into law in August, reauthorized the Higher Education Act of 1965, the law responsible for setting federal policy toward colleges and universities. The Bush administration spent the past five years working to renew the act, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, to alleviate financial burdens on those pursuing a degree. Actually writing many of these regulations will fall on the incoming administration.

Soares said it is a conversation that could take decades if it follows a path similar to the reform in K-12 education, which continues after 25 years.

Affordability and costs are the most visible higher education issues, Soares said, largely because advocates have to frame issues in the context of more pressing economic issues to see progress. Looking at where the country stands compared to  higher education systems around the world will likely frame higher education as a global survival issue, which Soares said makes it harder to ignore.

Ithaca College President Tom Rochon agrees.

“Personally, just as a citizen of higher education, I think we really do need a very strong commitment, one as strong as the kind to technologies we’ve led the world in for the last century,” Rochon said. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll keep that. I think our welfare and well-being depends on the commitment to higher education.”

Soares said the HEOA was a good step in the right direction,  but the reform still awaits significant progress.

“You need to think about it as if students are customers of higher education,” he said. “College is not going to be made more affordable with public policy … but students will start to get more value for their money with these new policies.”

The cost of attending college has grown nearly 40 percent in the past five years, according to the American Association of School Administrators. The average graduate now leaves college with more than $19,000 in debt — and within this decade, two million students who are otherwise qualified will not attend college because of its financial impact, the association said.

This year, nine million students applied for federal financial aid, an increase of 1.3 million students from the 7.7 million that applied last year, according to U.S. News and World Report. That does not include the number of students who apply for private loans each year.

The trend for the past 25 years has moved toward financing education with loans, instead of grants, which tends to put students in even more debt, Soares said. Shifting students’ inclination from private loans and toward federal loans and grants should be a priority of the next administration, he said.

“When you look at most of the proposals of the candidates they do tend to focus more broadly on access — in fairness, that’s the way a lot of people think about it now,” he said. “It’s the way the market for colleges is presented for them.”

But improving higher education is more than just making it more affordable — it’s also providing more quality measurement of schools so colleges and universities are better prepared to train and educate students, and students are more prepared to attend them, Soares said.

“We need to get beyond just the U.S. News and World Report,” he said. “That can be conceptually hard for someone who is looking at colleges. They’re mostly thinking in terms of the money, that’s the thing that’s most on their minds. If you had better information, you’d make better choices.”

Among the provisions of the HEOA is increased accountability and transparency, including a law that requires schools with the largest increases in tuition prices to report the reasons for the increases to the U.S. Department of Education.

Part of that transparency would require colleges and universities to more regularly report information, though specifics have yet to be written into the legislation.

“We’ll have a great deal more reporting responsibility, but specifically what we need to report, how it’s reported, when it’s reported, what are the kinds of numbers that will meet legislative objectives — all of that is still being determined in the “rule-making” process,” Rochon said.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing loan investigations drew attention to loan practices, but advocates are looking for ways to make these practices more transparent for all students.  

“We need to put some regulatory checks on lenders so students aren’t being taken advantage of,” Soares said.

The candidates are more similar in their commitment to higher education than on other issues, but Soares said students should stay active in advocating for some of these changes past the Nov. 4 election.

“You’re investing a significant amount of money in a college education,” he said. “And what are you getting for it? That’s why we need to focus on advocacy. If you’re a student, you’re a customer. We need to find a way to make people think that way.”