Policy Insights | Closing the Degree Gap: The West’s Contributions

This Policy Insight is a supplement to the Benchmarks series, offering a deeper analysis of how to meet projected educational attainment goals. But rather than calculating the additional college credentials needed for each state individually to reach the 60 percent goal set out by the Lumina Foundation, we estimate the number of credentials each WICHE state needs to produce in order for the West as a region to meet its share of the 8.4 million additional credentials needed by 2025, taking into account states’ current levels of educational attainment and projected population change over time.