Last week the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) hosted a World Conference on Higher Education.  Not surprisingly, the major recommendation to come out of the conference was that governments devote more money to higher education – it always is when a group like this gets together.

More enlightening are some of the statistics on the sweeping transformation in international higher education over the last decade, particularly the rapid rise in demand around the world.  How rapid?  In 2007, there were 152.5 million students enrolled in higher education worldwide, a 53% increase from a mere seven years earlier.  Over that same period, the percentage of college-aged young people enrolled in higher education increased from 19% to 26%.  The countries that are experiencing the largest growth also are experiencing problems with overcrowded classes and poor facilities.

West Virginia’s education trends are very different from the international trends being discussed at the World Conference.  First, West Virginia has a significantly higher college-going rate (42%) than the world at large.*  Second, the number of West Virginia students attending college is not growing nearly as fast as it is growing internationally.  Indeed West Virginia will see a decline in state residents going to college unless the college-going rate for traditional and/or non-traditional students increases significantly because the number of students in West Virginia’s public schools will shrink each year over most of the next half-decade.

*Because of differences in high school graduation rates, one of the best measures of college-going rates is the percentage of 9th graders who enroll in college by age 19, which I have used.  Some groups, like the Southern Regional Education Board, report college enrollment rates of recent high school graduates, which look much more favorable, but ignore students who left the education pipeline before graduating high school.  Internationally, the standard measure is the percentage of the mid-year population in the five-year age group after the official secondary school leaving age, a standard that recognizes differences in how nations set up their education systems.