*The industrial-era workplace* that lasted into the mid-20th century asked its “factory-model” primary and secondary schools to turn out large numbers of workers who could apply a fixed set of skills throughout a working lifetime. Such a workplace did not need a lot of managers capable of high-order thinking and problem solving. Thus the school-reform movements of the last two decades can be viewed as an attempt to figure out how to educate large masses of students to a level that was demanded of only a small proportion in previous generations.

U.S. higher education now faces the same challenge. As Patrick M. Callan of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education puts it: “It’s moving from being a sorting system to one where we have to ratchet up the skill levels of whole populations. That’s what other countries are doing, and we have to do likewise. For years the U.S. has been losing low-end jobs to other countries. We’re going to lose high-end jobs as well if we can’t produce the workers.”