• Student veterans sue UNC system alleging military discrimination

    Courtesy Hayleigh Perez

    Hayleigh Perez, a former Army sergeant who served in Iraq, is pictured with her daughter, Caleigh.

    By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

    Two student veterans who claim U.S. colleges are profiting from artificially inflated tuition fees by misclassifying the residency status of veterans have filed a federal lawsuit against the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, in part for allegedly engaging in that same practice.

    The suit, filed last Thursday in Raleigh, accuses the UNC Board of Governors of discriminating against Iraq War veterans and UNC branch students Hayleigh Perez, 26, and Jason Thigpen, 35, by allegedly failing to provide “adequate services, facilities, resources, and assistance” needed to help the two students transition from war to college.

    Perez and Thigpen are seeking $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the UNC Board of Governors for allegedly inflicting “profound financial hardship and psychological injuries” to the two veterans within a school system that “advertises and purports itself to be one of the most ‘military friendly’ in the country,” according to the suit. Last month, Perez, who attends UNC Pembroke, became the face of a national, grassroots campaign to stop American universities from stamping student veterans as out-of-state residents — thus forcing them to pay the schools $10,000 more in tuition each academic year — after returning home from combat deployments or other military assignments. (Her Change.org petition asking the UNC System to "stop discriminating against student veterans" has garnered mroe than 147,000 signatures). 

    “This is not about money. This is about colleges doing the right thing, doing the legal thing and taking care of these students the way they’re supposed to,” said Thigpen, who attends UNC Wilmington and who has been fighting residency claims for other UNC system student veterans through his organization, the Student Veterans Advocacy Group (SVAG).


    UNC officials responded to the suit with an emailed statement: “We believe the University has complied fully with federal and state law and has not discriminated against Ms. Perez or other student veterans.

    “To the contrary, UNC has demonstrated a strong commitment to North Carolina's military community,” added Joni Worthington, vice president of communications for the UNC system. “The 2012 UNC Serves Resource Guide provides an extensive campus-by-campus inventory of resources, support staffing, services and initiatives specifically dedicated to support military-affiliated students and their families. We're committed to do even more and continue to make incremental progress as resources allow.”

    On Oct. 22, NBC News reported SVAG’s assertion that some 250,000 student veterans — many of them lifelong residents of the states in which they're enrolled — were abruptly dubbed out of-state residents by their colleges and, thus, billed at higher tuition rates, after they were temporarily transferred to other military bases or deployed overseas. The practice has been seen at schools in 38 states, SVAG reported. 

    The issue centers on a fundamental change to the GI Bill, enacted last year by Congress, which stripped tuition benefits for veterans who attend public schools and who are categorized as out-of-state students. In-state student veterans enrolled at public institutions remain eligible for full tuition coverage under federal law. 

    The student-residency battle “makes up a portion” of the lawsuit, Thigpen said.

    But allegations that the UNC system discriminated against Thigpen and Perez are the fundamental underpinnings of the suit, Thigpen added.

    In short, the suit describes Thigpen, Perez and other student veterans in the UNC system as a “minority group.” And it alleges that when the plaintiffs each sought assistance from their individual UNC colleges — much like the services and resources provided “to other minority groups such as: African-Americans, LGBT, Hispanics, and women — they’re nearly none offered commensurate with having such high Veteran student populations,” the lawsuit said.

    The UNC system included about 10,200 student veterans as of 2011, representing nearly 9 percent of the total undergraduates attending the 16 UNC system schools, according to the lawsuit.

    “Had the federal (GI Bill) law not changed last year, would student veterans necessarily have issues with the lack of programs, facilities and resources available for them (in the UNC System)? Yes, they would,” Thigpen said in a phone interview. "But is residency classification one factor that led to this? Definitely.”

    When Congress altered the GI Bill and removed tuition coverage for out-of-state residents, that placed a large financial burden on thousands of student veterans, Thigpen said.

    Perez, for example, was classified as an out-of-state student by the UNC system after she temporarily accompanied her active-duty husband to Texas following his military transfer. While she was away, Perez said she continued making property tax payments on her North Carolina home. When she returned and enrolled at UNC Pembroke, the school billed her tuition fees at the out-of-state rate, costing her an extra $4,600 for one semester.

    “When you have such a drastic change, obviously there’s going to be a much greater need for school services for the thousands of veterans who are attending the UNC system,” Thigpen said. “They are going to need more resources. But by not responding to our numerous requests for changes to the existing veterans’ services, that leads to (our claims of) discrimination and negligence.”

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  • Home but not a 'resident': Some student veterans fighting to stay on GI Bill

    courtesy of Hayleigh Perez

    Hayleigh Perez, a former Army sergeant who served in Iraq, argues that the University of North Carolina system has over-billed by her $4,600 that should have been covered, she contends, by the GI Bill. She is holding her daughter Caleigh.

    By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

    Some 250,000 student veterans are being forced to pay $10,000 for tuition each academic year because many colleges are misclassifying the residency status of those veterans — often for the schools’ own financial gain — according to a student veterans organization.

    The issue centers on a fundamental change to the GI Bill, enacted last year by Congress, which stripped tuition benefits for veterans who attend public schools and who are categorized as out-of-state students. In-state student veterans enrolled at public institutions remain eligible for full tuition coverage under federal law. 

    But the financial fallout of the residency crunch is impacting student veterans in about 38 states, including Florida, North Carolina and California, reports the Student Veterans Advocacy Group (SVAG). Many of those same student veterans are lifelong residents of the states in which they’re now enrolled — even owning homes in those states — but their schools stamped them as out-of-state residents after they were temporarily transferred to other military bases, or deployed overseas.

    “Many veterans are having to quit school because they can’t afford that $5,000 per semester they have to now pay out of pocket,” said Jason Thigpen, founder and president of SVAG, which is based in North Carolina. Thigpen, a student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is not personally affected by the classification problems. As a U.S. Army sergeant, he earned a Purple Heart medal for combat wounds he sustained in Iraq in 2009.


    “This is the first time in the history of the GI Bill that we can’t get the education that we were promised,” Thigpen said. “It’s a debt that’s owed to these services members. Our veterans are just asking what was promised to them — no more, no less.”

    Dozens of student veterans, who recently used SVAG to successfully appeal and overturn their out-of-state residency classifications at their colleges, used utility bills and mortgage papers to prove that they are — and have been — living in their home states, Thigpen said.

    Despite a similar pile of residency proof, however, student veteran Hayleigh Perez, 26, has failed during several hearings to convince the University of North Carolina that she was fully eligible for GI Bill tuition benefits when she attended UNC Pembroke last spring.

    Perez, who was stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 2006, legally maintained her residence in Fayetteville, N.C., during a subsequent 15-month deployment to Iraq, she said. When she returned to North Carolina, she got married in that state. In 2008, Perez and her husband bought a home in Hoke County, N.C. and she registered as a voter. In 2009, the U.S. military relocated Perez and her husband to Texas, but the couple continued to pay property taxes on their North Carolina home, she said.

    Perez received an honorable discharge from the Army in 2009. Last spring, after her husband was transferred back to North Carolina, Perez enrolled at UNC Pembroke. She was stunned, however, when the school billed her $4,600 for a semester of tuition because she’d been deemed an out-of-state resident — and, thus, ineligible for the GI Bill.

    “It is disgraceful,” Perez said. “I was forced to borrow the money for my tuition from family members.”

    She filed a grievance with UNC Pembroke, offering as evidence of her residency the property records, her marriage license and her North Carolina voter ID. The school denied her appeal, she said. She ultimately took her case leaders of the UNC school system in Chapel Hill — and met with UNC officials yet again last Tuesday with Thigpen at her side. Once more, she said, her claim was denied. (While the UNC school system is headquartered Chapel Hill, Perez's claim does not involve the system's flagship college, UNC-Chapel Hill). 

    NBC News asked UNC to address Perez’s assertion that she should be classified by the school system as an in-state resident. Laura B. Fjeld, a UNC vice president and general counsel, e-mailed a response: “We are not at liberty to offer any details in connection with the case of Ms. Perez because of the privacy protections afforded her under FERPA (the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).”

    Meanwhile, in North Carolina, there are about 5,000 additional student veterans like Perez who are wrongly classified by their colleges as out-of-state residents — and many of those take classes within the UNC system, Thigpen contends. He has personally represented 32 of those students during their hearings to overturn their residency classifications, winning each case, he said. 

    courtesy of Hayleigh Perez

    Student veteran Hayleigh Perez now attends Methodist University in Fayetteville, N.C. Since spring, she's battled the University of North Carolina to reimburse her for $4,600 in tuition she argues she never should have paid under the GI Bill.

    On that point, Fjeld responded: “We believe that the (North Carolina) State Residency Manual which governs classification of residency for tuition purposes, is consistent with state and federal law.”

    “This isn’t just North Carolina, though,” Perez said. “This has become an issue nationally. People are serving multiple deployments, and to face these kinds of hardships when they get home is crazy.”

    Perez knows well the scope of the issue. She posted an online petition at change.org, asking the “UNC Board of Governors” to “Stop Discriminating Against Student Veterans.” Within the petition, she also revealed her situation, point by point. As of Monday evening, more than 143,000 supporters had signed the petition — including people who said they are student veterans experiencing the same residency problems — and tuition bills — in Virginia, Florida and other states.

    Why are some colleges such sticklers on the residency disputes filed by student veterans, forcing many to pay out-of-state tuition fees even though they reside in the same state?

    If a public college agrees with a student’s assertion that he or she is an in-state resident and, consequently, allowed to attend school tuition-free on the GI bill, the federal government then directly sends the school that tuition payment — in North Carolina, that’s $5,000, on average, per academic year at public institutions, Thigpen said.

    If the school holds fast to its ruling that a student veteran should be classified as an out-of-state enrollee, the student must pay the school out of pocket for tuition — in North Carolina, that’s $16,000, on average, per academic year at public colleges, Thigpen said.

    “When you multiply that $11,000 difference over just say 5,000 to 10,000 student veterans who are affected by this,” Thigpen said, “you’re talking about over $100 million a year.”

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  • College tuition insurance for your child? It depends, experts say

    By Sevil Omer, NBC News

    Sandra Rizkallah feared that her daughter's long-term illness could prevent her from completing her freshman year at Landmark College in Putney, Vt. -- a school where tuition cost $40,000 annually, not including room and board.


    "I worried about her medical history and I worried about the expense," said Rizkallah, a Boston-area mother. "She had been accepted into an expensive school, she wanted to pursue an education, and she had health issues. We wanted so much for her to be able to go to school."

    Rizkallah joined a growing number of parents in the United States taking out insurance to cover loss of tuition in the event their children become sick and drop out of expensive colleges or prep schools, experts say.

    Thanks to that insurance, Rizkallah recovered a portion of her daughter's tuition last year when her daughter, now 23, returned home ill.

    “It's definitely gaining traction with families," said John T. Fees, co-founder and CEO of the Next Generation Insurance Group, creators of GradGuard, a tuition insurance program. The company has 200,000 families enrolled in a tuition insurance coverage plan, he said. "Twenty years ago, college was affordable and you didn’t have to worry about how to pay (for tuition) ... Parents need to know they will be able to recover from a financial loss, if it were to occur."

    But some experts say most families don't need such insurance, which can add hundreds of dollars in costs onto an already expensive education. 

    "I don’t recommend it," said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, a free online resource about scholarships and financial aid. But he added that "it is a personal decision and depends on whether they need the reassurance."

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    More families are being encouraged by colleges and private schools  to sign up for tuition refund or reimbursement policies touted by private insurance companies and private schools, insurance and financial experts say. Typical coverage is about $15,000 a year, Fees said. According to GradGuard, general coverage includes:

    • Medical Disability: "If a student has to withdraw due to their accidental death, verified illness or an unforeseen physical disability (as defined by a physician) incurred after the policy goes into effect, the Plan will reimburse 100 percent of covered expenses up to the policy limits. If a physician indicates that the medical disability is due to emotional, nervous, or mental disorders, the Plan will also reimburse 100 percent of covered expenses.”
    • Death of a tuition payer: "If a student has to completely withdraw due to the death of a tuition payer, the plan will pay 100 percent of covered fees."

    But experts caution that tuition insurance typically doesn't cover costs if a student decides to just up and quit school, gets kicked out or is homesick.

    'Assurance with insurance'
    A.W.G. Dewar was the first tuition refund insurance company in the United States and has been providing coverage since 1930, according to the Insurance Information Institute in New York. It claims it provides up to 100 percent coverage for medically necessary withdrawals at more than 180 colleges and 1,200 private elementary and secondary schools. It is now part of One Beacon Insurance Group Ltd., institute officials say. Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student lender, also provides tuition coverage, according to the institute.

    While no exact numbers are available of how many people have opted for tuition insurance, college administrators say more parents are requesting information on it.

    "College is a big investment and for some parents, just knowing they can gain some assurance with insurance makes them feel more comfortable," said Teri L. Blanchard, associate vice president for finance at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where about 10 percent of the 1,600 students enrolled at the private liberal arts school purchased insurance last year. Blanchard said she even bought insurance for her son 15 years ago. "It made sense at the time."

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    She said administrators at Kenyon College also offer their own tuition insurance, charging $199 per semester to cover the year's tuition. This school year, that's nearly $43,000.

    Most colleges and universities have refund policies. For instance, at Fordham University, near the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, N.Y., students are able to get back their tuition, about $40,000 a year, if they withdraw by the second week of the semester, according to the university. Private schools throughout the U.S. require some form of insurance coverage, Fees said.

    'A personal decision'
    Skeptics urge parents to review the insurance company's refund policy before buying.

    Mark Kantrowitz.

    "It’s a specialized insurance, and people have to ask themselves: ‘Do I really need it?'” said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, a free online resource about scholarships and financial aid. "A typical college student is going to be relatively healthy, and tuition insurance is often not financially worthwhile. Tuition refund insurance is more likely to be of interest to parents whose children are attending more expensive colleges."

    Kantrowitz said tuition refund insurance typically costs 1 percent to 5 percent of the face value of the coverage per year, ranging from $100 to $1,000 depending on the college's costs and claim history.

    Margaret McBurney of Kensington, Md., said she was among the parents who needed "peace of mind." She signed up with GradGuard a year ago after her third child headed off to college on the East Coast.

    “I had already spent a large of amount of tuition on my children, and I heard about it and I thought it sounded like a good idea,” said McBurney. She said she paid about $12,000 a semester in tuition for her daughter, who is now 21. For a $25,000 insurance policy, she said she paid $48 a month for a year. “I kind of wished that I had done it earlier for my peace of mind.”

    “As it turned out, my student became ill in college,” McBurney said. She described the reimbursement process as “relatively simple and once the college provided the documents the tuition was reimbursed.”

    Do you have an education-related story or topic you'd like to share? Contact NBC News' Sevil Omer at sevil.omer@msnbc.com.

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  • Colleges freeze, reduce tuition as public balks at further price hikes

    University of the South

    At a time when students and families are fed with up with rising college costs, University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., cut tuition 10 percent last year and is promising to keep costs unchanged for entering freshmen for the next four years.

    By Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report

    As an undergraduate at the University of California–Irvine, Christopher Campbell was almost forced to drop out by repeated double-digit increases in tuition — some in the middle of the academic year — to compensate for massive state budget cuts.


    Campbell ultimately made it through and is starting law school at UCI this fall. But he watched classmates driven out of college by the unpredictable mid-year price hikes.

    Now he’s pushing an amendment to the California constitution that would ban public universities from raising tuition for students after they’ve enrolled.

    “Students and families are fed up,” Campbell says. “And that’s only going to get worse. As more and more students have to deal with these problems, it’s just going to keep building until the problem is fixed.”

    After three decades of tuition hikes that have outpaced inflation and increases in family income, students, families, legislators and governing boards are demanding a halt.

    “Enough is enough,” says Anne Mariucci, a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, which for the first time in 20 years has frozen in-state tuition at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University after increases over the last five years of 84 and 96 percent, respectively.

    Some private universities, too, have agreed to stop raising their tuition, or even cut it, after being alarmed to discover their enrollments starting to slip.

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    “The pushback is beginning,” says John McCardell Jr., president of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., which last year cut tuition 10 percent and this year is promising to keep the cost unchanged for entering freshmen for four years.

    Sewanee, as the university is known, was losing students to the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia and other cheaper public institutions, McCardell says, and the size of the entering class was beginning to slide.

    “Price probably has more than nothing to do with that,” he says. Students and their families “are voting with their feet.”

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    Or with their votes. The Arizona regents were reportedly being pressed to get a handle on tuition by the governor and legislators. They, in turn, were hearing from increasingly angry constituents. “About time,” read the headline on an editorial in the ASU State Press, the student newspaper, when the tuition freeze was finally proposed. “As prices continue to go up, you have people saying, you can’t keep doing that,” says Rick Myers, chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents.

    The 10-campus University of California system also froze undergraduate tuition for this fall after the governor and legislature there made doing so a condition of a $125 million budget increase — though there’s a hitch: Tuition will increase more than 20 percent in the middle of the year if voters fail to approve a tax increase in November to raise $8.5 billion for public education and other services, a quid pro quo that some critics say is blackmail.

    Texas legislators have long pushed for a tuition freeze at that state’s public universities. When Gov. Rick Perry added his voice to the chorus this year, his appointees on the board of regents agreed — over university officials’ objections — to forgo a planned 5 percent increase over two years at the flagship University of Texas–Austin, where tuition now will be unchanged. Tuition also will be frozen at the Arlington campus. “It isn’t in the interest of most Texans for universities to be continually raising their tuition rates,” Perry was quoted as saying.

    Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick also announced that he opposed a 5 percent tuition increase at University of Massachusetts campuses, though the system’s board of trustees imposed it anyway.

    The only exception is the University of Massachusetts School of Law, which will hold tuition level. So will the law schools at the University of New Hampshire. Last year, the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law froze its tuition. Not coincidentally, the number of law-school applicants plummeted by more than 15 percent for the academic year that begins this fall — on top of declines of 10 percent in each of the previous two years — according to the Law School Admission Council. The number of students taking the Law School Admission Test this year suggests the trend will continue. Meanwhile, one third of law-school graduates in 2010 did not have jobs nine months later, and starting pay for those who did was down 13 percent. Phoebe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland’s law school, cited “the impact of the economic downturn on the legal employment market” as one of her reasons for freezing tuition.

    Equating price with prestige
    Colleges and universities have long been reluctant to lower or cap their prices, McCardell says, because — as with new cars and fine wines — they believe students and their families equate price with prestige. That, he says, is why elite private colleges all magically end up within a few hundred dollars of one another each year.

    In his 25 years as a higher-education administrator, “I was reared to believe that what you charge is a reflection of your position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “And I was reared to believe that no matter what happens, the American people will pay the sticker price. But all that changed fundamentally in 2008,” at the start of the economic downturn.

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    Supply and demand have not traditionally affected the price of higher education. That’s because supply largely remained unchanged, while demand was ever-rising. But the number of high-school graduates, which peaked in 2009, is starting to decline. Enrollment fell at more than 40 percent of colleges and universities last year, according to the credit-rating firm Moody’s. At least 375 institutions still had space available for this fall when the admissions period was over, the largest number in a decade, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports. The percentage of accepted students who actually enroll is also falling. A recent analysis of public and private nonprofit colleges by Bain & Company found that one third were on an “unsustainable financial path.”

    Colleges that are especially feeling the squeeze are those with small enrollments and endowments — and those are also the kinds of private colleges and universities that are maintaining their tuition levels to remain competitive.

    Private Oklahoma City University, for instance, competes with more than 25 public institutions — most of them cheaper — in a state of fewer than four million. “Access to higher education is broad here,” says Susan Barber, provost at the university, which froze tuition this year. “We had discussions that we hoped this would help retention of students and in our recruitment efforts. It wasn’t completely an altruistic decision.”

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    Other schools that have frozen their tuition this fall include Burlington College in Vermont, which has about 200 undergraduates; Ancilla College, a Catholic, two-year liberal-arts college in Indiana with about 530 students; the 730-student Tabor College, a Mennonite school in Kansas; liberal-arts Urbana University in Ohio, which has 1,270 students; Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, which has 1,300 undergraduates; and Pacific Union College, a Seventh-Day Adventist college in California with an enrollment of 1,530.

    “The question is, how much can you charge for your product? And that is a reflection of the laws of supply and demand and your sense of your own position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “Why are people shopping at Costco and Sam’s Club? That’s a terrible analogy, but I can get a really good box of cherries at Costco for a whole lot less than I can get them at the Piggly Wiggly.”

    Slashing prices
    This fall, a few private colleges and universities — trying to compete with cheaper public institutions — are offering Costco-style markdowns. In New Jersey, for instance, private Seton Hall is matching the price of public Rutgers University for freshmen with top grades and SAT scores. That comes to about a 60 percent discount. Cabrini College, near Philadelphia, cut its tuition 12.5 percent and promised not to raise it above $30,000 through at least 2015.

    Lincoln College, a private two-year college in Illinois, lowered its tuition 24 percent and the University of Charleston in West Virginia 22 percent, both in response to declining enrollments. William Peace University, a women’s college with 700 students in North Carolina, slashed tuition nearly 8 percent to attract men as it becomes co-educational, and to increase its enrollment by 50 percent. And Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, is responding to a big drop in applications to its school of education by giving 50 percent discounts to incoming freshmen.

    If students and their families are straying from expensive institutions, a few schools that are freezing or reducing what they charge seem to be winning them back. At Sewanee, applications have risen 17 percent, and the number of entering freshmen is up more than 12 percent. Oklahoma City University has 30 more freshmen enrolled this fall than last, and the number of students dropping out is down.

    Back in California, Christopher Campbell is juggling law school and his referendum campaign to keep tuition flat for students who enroll at the state’s public universities.

    “Whoever I tell,” he says, “is always, ‘Yeah, hey, let’s put this through.’ ”

    This story, "Colleges freeze, reduce tuition as public balks at further price hikes," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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  • US sees small gains in college completion for young adults

    By Sevil Omer, NBC News

    Young adults are making modest gains in college completion, but fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of having the U.S. tops in the world in the percentage of college graduates, according to government figures.


    Data released by the U.S. Department of Education showed 39.3 percent of young adults (ages 25 to 34) in the country had earned an associate, bachelor's or graduate degree in 2010, a half-percentage point increase from the previous year.

    Figures were released ahead of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s address to the National Governor’s Association in Williamsburg, Va., on Friday.

    Duncan will call on governors and colleges and universities to rein in spiraling college tuition costs, one of the roadblocks to earning a degree, according to prepared remarks.

    "We've made some progress, but the combination of deep state budget cuts and rising tuition prices is pushing an affordable college education out of reach for middle-class families," Duncan says in the remarks. "As the president has said, the countries that out-educate today will out-compete us tomorrow. The federal government has done a tremendous amount to increase the amount of aid available to students. But we need states and institutions to meet us halfway by doing more to keep college costs down."

    Cost of tuition at four-year public universities jumped by 15 percent between 2008 and 2010, a rise fueled by state funding cuts, according to the department. The department also cites 40 states as having to slash higher education spending in the last year.

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    Reviewing the government's state-by-state figures, Montana claimed the biggest percentage increase in young college graduates, rising from 37.1 percent in 2009 to 40.3 percent in 2010.

    According to The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet, Montana mines its success with a no-nonsense approach:

    Montana started its push to churn out more degree-holders by bolstering its system of two-year colleges. Like other states, it had to overcome perceptions that two-year colleges are little more than trade schools for students whose grades aren’t good enough to go to four-year universities — a matter made worse in Montana, where many of them were, in fact, vocational high schools before being transformed, in the mid-1990s, into so-called “colleges of technology.”

    In Montana, small changes spur nation's biggest jump in college graduates

    Washington D.C. had the highest percentage in 2010 on the list, 68.8 percent. The state with the highest percentage was Massachusetts, with 54.3 percent, unchanged from the year before, however.

    Obama wants the U.S. to lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by the year 2020.

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    The United States ranks 16th in the world, trailing South Korea, Canada, Japan and Russia, according to The Associated Press, citing a 2011 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The AP reports:

    To meet the president's goal, an estimated 10 million more Americans ages 25 to 34 will need to earn a two- or four-year degree.

    The data released Thursday shows most states will need to make dramatic leaps in order to meet the goal of having 60 percent of the nation's young adults with a college degree.

    In Florida, there were 816,946 adults ages 25 to 34 with a post-secondary degree. That number will need to increase to at least 1.48 million. In New York, the number will need to rise from 1.3 million to 1.67 million.

    See the U.S. Department of Education's complete state-by-state rankings in college attainment

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