According to this story in the Chronicle, the Lumina Foundation is shifting its focus and will “work to enact the changes needed to drastically improve college graduation rates.” Its goal is for 60 percent of Americans to have a postsecondary degree by 2025.

Whether there is any need to do that was the topic of the PBS debate Lumina helped sponsor last February. I believe that Rich Vedder and I, arguing against the proposition, showed that we have already badly oversold higher education, and that efforts to put more kids through college will have minimal benefit at high cost. I wrote about the debate here. Following the debate, I suggested to Lumina president Jamie Merisotis that the foundation ought to do some serious research to find out if its crusade to increase graduation rates makes any sense. No research, evidently. Full speed ahead!

If getting a college degree is so beneficial, why don’t more people do it? Could it be because lots of young Americans are so academically weak that they can’t or won’t tackle the work required, even though at many schools the curriculum has been watered down to middle-school level? Or could it be because it’s now widely known that many college graduates end up in jobs that high school kids can do? It’s a combination of both, and I can’t see what changes Lumina can help enact that would change either.

Aiming at some specific college-graduation rate strikes me as just as nonsensical as for politicians to aim at some specific homeownership rate.