This summer, the PBS NewsHour’s Rethinking College series explored the changing landscape of American higher education.

Recently, Ted Mitchell, under secretary of education, sat down with the NewsHour to talk about the recent push for experimentation with competency-based college degree programs, the pending federal college rating system, concerns over growing student debt and other issues we examined.

As the third-highest ranking federal education official, Mitchell oversees the Obama administration’s higher education initiatives. He was formerly president of Occidental College, dean of the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and professor and chair of the Department of Education at Dartmouth College. Before joining the Department of Education, he was CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund and president of the California State Board of Education from 2008 to 2010.

When it comes to the push for innovation in the area of competency-based college degree programs — degrees based more on demonstrated skills than time in class — how do you balance innovation and ensuring that students are earning credentials that are valued in the labor market?

I do worry about that. I think that it’s a tension we’re increasingly familiar with, whether it’s with competency-based education or traditional education. It’s the tension between what students learn or believe they’re learning and what they’re demonstrating in the workplace. I think competency-based education has an opportunity to shorten that cycle, because of the specificity of the competencies that students are learning, their attachment to very specific tasks or jobs in the marketplace and then feedback about whether students are learning those or not. It’s harder to do with a history major than it is to do with someone who is actually certified with having a competency, for example in critical problem solving skills.

Is there a danger that these narrowly-focused credentials won’t hold their value as the marketplace changes?

There are two worries there. One is the old vocational worry, where you’re training people for yesterday’s job. And I think that with active participation of employers in the design of these programs, we’re getting employers who are looking five or 10 years out, not just looking to fill five sales positions tomorrow. So I think keeping the conversation forward looking is important, and that will happen at the institutional level. The second issue is that I think that we need to be careful that in modularizing or compartmentalizing some of these very specific competencies that we’re not losing the overall arc of higher education, which is a value that is transformative in lots of ways, not just the accumulation of skills.

The administration has a stated goal of making the United States the country with the world’s highest degree attainment again. When you look at the numbers, the countries that outperform us in degree attainment are doing it with vocational degrees. Is it a matter of attracting more Americans to these programs or helping them be more successful? What is the department doing in these areas?

Yes, we lag our peers in helping adult students develop skills that are valued today and tomorrow in the market place. Institutions across the country are getting much better at it and are wildly successful. They have 80, 90 percent graduation rates, 80, 90 percent placement rates. So we need to get the word out about the vitality and the vibrancy of those programs and part of the word we need to get out is that these are not yesterdays “voc ed” programs, these are really high-tech training programs that also involve the 21st Century deeper learning skills of collaboration, problem-solving, creative thinking – the things that are needed all the way up and down the employment pipeline.

There is a glut of college rankings out there. How do you keep the upcoming White House ratings system from just adding to the noise? At the same time, how do you make sure the information is getting to lower-income, underserved communities that may not be tapping into the information that’s already out there?

We start from the fundamental proposition that we need to play back to the American people the results of this incredible investment that we make, that we all make, that you and I make, in higher education. So our responsibility, first and foremost, is to play that back to the people.

We think that we can create a set of simple, stable, clear metrics that will cut through the noise and will not look to differentiate (colleges) at the 93rd decimal point, but will just provide sensible, credible, clear information to families and cut through the noise to help families and help the public get a better understanding of how that investment is paying off for individuals.

Do you see families accessing and understanding the existing White House College Scorecard information that’s out there now?

We do. Not to the extent that we would like. We would like there to be greater uptake with the Scorecard information and with the financial aid shopping sheet. We need to do a better job promoting our own tools.

There’s been a fair amount of push back about whether the problem of student debt has been blown out of proportion. For example, this recent Brookings Institute report on the financial health of households with student debt. What’s your reaction to that criticism?

I think that we need to be more careful about parsing the trillion dollars than we’ve been to date. I think it’s important to recognize that big borrowers, in general, are borrowing for professional and graduate programs. A focus on undergraduate student aid makes it look more manageable at a student level and at a national level.

The college investment continues to be one of the best investments an individual can make and we continue to believe and believe strongly that it’s one of the best investments a society can make.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to make student debt more affordable and to lower the necessity of students to take out large loans to pay for college. So we need to continue to work on lowering college cost, we need to encourage states to up their investment in higher education and we need to do things like president has done increasing access to income drive repayment programs that we think are going to provide a nice alternative to students who are struggling to pay their debts.

Serving underrepresented, first-in-their family and other ‘non-traditional’ students can simply cost more. Is the push for greater efficiency and lower costs in higher education incompatible with broadening access?

So it is a tension, and it’s clear that the rich supports that vulnerable student populations need increase costs at institutions. That said, there are other places I think we need to challenge institutions to do more with less or simply take some things out of the equation in order to, on net, reduce the total cost.

PBS NewsHour coverage of higher education is supported by the Lumina Foundation and American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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As with most moments in my adult life, it was my students and literature that taught me the most significant lessons about the meaning of 9/11.

That morning felt unremarkable, even after my co-teacher came back into the room in the middle of second period to whisper something to me about planes crashing and terrorism. It was only my second year of teaching high school. By the end of the day, I had my classes journaling their initial reactions, creating a sort of time capsule, I said, for when their future selves wanted to remember.

I quickly wrote an article for an online magazine discussing how our view of events was filtered through the lens of pop culture, specifically action and disaster movies, and appeared on Canada’s version of “Morning Edition” two days after the attacks.

It was not until several years later, however, when a colleague suggested a new book for my curriculum, that I realized how distant and abstract my reaction and understanding of 9/11 had been.

That book was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. From the opening pages, the quirky young voice of Oskar Schell cut through my own agenda and intellectualization of 9/11 and awed me with the immensity of the trauma.

Foer’s novel, besides being an engrossing page-turner, invites and rewards close literary analysis. Its inventive structure plays masterfully with varying points of view and historical settings, using multiple motifs to tie together disparate stories. But the emotional core of the book also resists analysis — or, more accurately, resists the resolution that such academic exercises try to construct.

You cannot read the book without pausing and letting your emotions rule the day. When faced with the inexplicable, whether 9/11 or a previous catastrophe such as the bombings of World War II, the book asserts that the normal things in life, such as the words we use or the relationships we rely on, can fail us. And we can fail them.

The more I teach the book, however, the more distant 9/11 becomes in our culture.

In recent years, when I open the unit with a news montage of that morning in 2001, many students tell me it is the first time they viewed video of the events or had a substantial conversation about it. My students now were young enough in 2001 that their parents shielded them from the pain and suffering, but as they have gotten older, no one has taken the time to explain an event that has shaped the social and political context of their lives.

Last year, one of my other colleagues and her students did something to break that silence after reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: they created their own 9/11 memorial in a local park and invited the broader community to reflect.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about speaking about the unspoken or recognizing what is unspeakable. With that inspiration, we try to raise a voice, even if it is hesitant or incomplete, to memorialize the past and acknowledge the lasting effects of 9/11 on the present.

Bernie Heidkamp is an English teacher Oak Park River Forest High School in Oak Park, IL. For more on how to teach 9/11 to students of all ages, check out another teacher’s perspective.

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WASHINGTON — Rosemary Anderson could be 81 by the time she pays off her student loans. After struggling with divorce, health problems and an underwater home mortgage, the 57-year-old anticipates there could come a day when her Social Security benefits will be docked to make the payments.

Like Anderson, a growing percentage of aging Americans struggle to pay back their student debt. Tens of thousands of them even see their Social Security benefits garnished when they cannot do so.

Among Americans ages 65 to 74, 4 percent in 2010 carried federal student loan debt, up from 1 percent six years earlier, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday at a Senate Aging Committee hearing. For all seniors, the collective amount of student loan debt grew from about $2.8 billion in 2005 to about $18.2 billion last year.

Student debt for all ages totals $1 trillion.

“Some may think of student loan debt as just a young person’s problem,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman of the committee. “Well, as it turns out, that’s increasingly not the case.”

Anderson, of Watsonville, California, amassed $64,000 in student loans, beginning in her 30s, as she worked toward her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She said she has worked multiple jobs — she’s now at the University of California, Santa Cruz — to pay off credit card debt and has renegotiated terms of her home mortgage, but hasn’t been able to make a student loan payment in eight years. The amount she now owes has ballooned to $126,000.

“I find it very ironic that I incurred this debt as a way to improve my life, and yet I still sit here today because the debt has become my undoing,” Anderson said in prepared testimony for the hearing.

Despite not making payments, she’s managed to keep the education debt in good standing, she said.

Ed Boltz, a bankruptcy attorney in Durham, North Carolina, who is president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, said in an interview that many of the seniors he sees with student loan debt are also struggling with challenges such a medical problems, job loss or divorce. Some, he said, went back to school with hopes of making a higher salary and that didn’t pan out, or the children they helped fund to attend school are not in a position to help the parent in return.

“They are stuck with these debts and they can’t try again,” Boltz said. “There’s no second act for them. It holds off on people retiring.”

The GAO found that about 80 percent of the student loan debt by seniors was for their own education while the rest was taken out for their children or other dependents. It said federal data showed that seniors were more likely to default on loans for themselves compared with those they took out for their children.

It’s unclear when the loans originated, although the GAO noted that the time period to pay back such debt can range from a decade to 25 years. That means some older Americans could have taken out the loans when they were younger and they’ve accumulated with interest, or got them later in life — such as workers who enrolled in college after a layoff in the midst of the economic downturn.

The GAO found that about a quarter of loans held by seniors ages 65 to 74 were in default. The number of older Americans who had their Social Security benefits offset to pay student loan debt increased about fivefold, from 31,000 to 155,000, from 2002 to 2013.

“As the baby boomers continue to move into retirement, the number of older Americans with defaulted loans will only continue to increase,” the GAO said. “This creates the potential for an unpleasant surprise for some, as their benefits are offset and they face the possibility of a less secure retirement.”

Typically, student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. In addition to docking Social Security, the government can use a variety of tools to recoup student loans, such as docking wages or taking tax refund dollars.

Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said these seniors having their Social Security docked likely don’t have much discretionary income and Congress should consider taking away this option. There’s a limit to how much Social Security can be docked, but some seniors are left with benefits below the poverty level, the GAO said.

“It’s not an issue that affects large numbers of people,” Baum said. “It’s a very big issue for people who are affected by it.”

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The United States’ spending on higher education far outstrips that of other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to the group’s annual Education at a Glance report released today. Annually, the U.S. spends about $26,000 per student, compared to the OECD average of less than $14,000.

But it looks like Americans may not be getting as much return on their investment as they could be.

In 2012, 43 percent of 25 to 64 year-old Americans held a degree beyond a high school diploma — up seven percentage points from 36 percent in 2000. Despite President Obama’s goals for increasing college access and completion, many OECD countries saw their degree-holding population rise faster over the same period. Canada, the only country where residents held more degrees than Americans in 2000, saw a 13 point jump to 53 percent in 2012. Luxembourg had the biggest increase — degree holders there rose from 18 to 39 percent of working-aged adults. (In the graphs included in this post upper secondary refers to educational attainment equivalent to a high school diploma in the U.S. and tertiary refers to the level of an associate’s degree or higher.)

When it comes to the skills degree holders actually possess, just about a quarter of college-educated Americans reached the highest levels of proficiency on an adult skills test of literacy. That was near the OECD average, but below their peers in the U.K., Belgium, Norway, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Japan. Meanwhile, only 19 percent of college-educated Americans score at the highest levels on a similar test of numeracy, on par with Estonia. In only Spain, Italy, Korea and Ireland do their peers fare worse.

The chances of attaining a higher level of education than your parents is also relatively low in the United States. About 30 percent of working age Americans are more educated than their parents. That number was lower only in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic. The U.S. also has one of the highest rates of adults with less education than their parents at about 16 percent.

PBS NewsHour coverage of higher education is supported by the Lumina Foundation and American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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