“The money didn’t happen,” says Jim Jacobs, who, as president of Macomb, welcomed Obama to the stage for his announcement on July 14, 2009. “He gave a great speech and the program has now been reduced from $12 billion to $2 billion in $500 million chunks.”
Justin Hamilton, spokesman for U.S. Education Department (ED) Secretary Arne Duncan, says the administration is making progress toward the 2020 goal — every governor, for example, has been challenged to convene a college-completion summit — but he acknowledged, “We’ve got a tremendous amount of work ahead of us.”
States have slashed billions of dollars from higher education, and $5.3 billion in federal stimulus funds they got to prevent even deeper cuts has, or will soon, run out.
The proportion of their budgets that states earmark for higher education fell from 11.4 percent when Obama called for higher graduation rates to 10 percent last year, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. The American Association of Community Colleges has said that the president’s 2020 graduation goal will not be reached unless resources are “significantly increased.”
“There isn’t enough support for higher education, and there aren’t enough real resources for us to do the job” of raising graduation rates, says Jacobs. “There’s no question about that.”
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