There is a big gap, and it's disturbing. What i like to focus on is how many high school graduates are going straight to college. If they don't make that transition, the chance of them making it in the future is much smaller. I am worried that this could be a driver of increase poverty and another factor exasperating inequality going into the future. We have a group of people who normally would have gone to college, they're not going to college.
Enrollment is down for the first time in memory, and critics complain college is too expensive, too elitist, and too politicized. The economist Chris Paxson — who happens to be the president of Brown University — does not agree. (Part 3 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)