In his previous post, Jamie Merisotis makes a compelling case for the importance of seeing American higher education in the context of higher education worldwide, and for treating our system of higher education as an imperiled competitive advantage.

As Jamie notes, U.S. educational attainment “has remained flat for 40 years” -- a fact all the more worrisome in light of rising college enrollments , with too many students failing to complete degrees. Getting more students from an increasingly diverse school-age population to and through college has become a national economic imperative. If we are going to get back to #1, it is time to give the nation’s colleges and universities some close, serious systematic attention.

It is time, in fact, for a second Truman Commission on Higher Education. In 1946, President Truman convened a commission to chart directions for higher education in America in the post-war era. The Commission’s plan, laid out in its 1947 report, Higher Education for Democracy, has guided the nation’s colleges and universities for more than 60 years.

The far-seeing Truman Commission identified barriers to access in higher education that needed to be surmounted: race, religion, gender, income, and geography. It called for the radical expansion of two-year colleges, which it labeled community colleges, and stated that 49 percent of the population was capable of higher education. It recommended a program of financial aid and a renewal of general education. It described the years after the war as “a time of crisis” and saw education as “the biggest and most hopeful” potential remedy.

A little more than a decade later, Clark Kerr led the creation of the California Master Plan, built largely on the Truman Commission recommendations. The plan defined the mission of higher education in the state and created three distinct sectors to assure both access and excellence. It also provided choice, so that students could attend the sector of higher education best matched to their interests and abilities. The model was deemed so important that TIME magazine put Kerr on its cover for this work.

Five years later, with the Higher Education Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson provided the financial aid programs to make these goals, to a great extent, realities. And so, because of the work of the Truman Commission and the models it spawned, access, choice and excellence have been the guiding principles of American higher education — at least rhetorically — for over half a century.

Today, with the promises of access and choice fading and excellence threatened, we need another Truman Commission to help American higher education face challenges offered by the global marketplace, as well as major economic, demographic, and technological shifts.

Many of these challenges come from outside higher education. In an era when more than two out of three high school graduates attend some form of postsecondary education, government regards higher education as a mature industry — not a growth industry, as in the decades after World War II. In the postwar years, government merely sought the prompt expansion of campuses, faculties, and enrollments. Today, it demands efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. Government is examining issues it would in the past have delegated to universities, such as tuition pricing, graduation rates, faculty workloads, and other historically internal issues. Controls and regulation are increasing. Increasingly, government may treat higher education in the same fashion as the health care industry.

Another part of the problem is demographic. In the years ahead, numbers of small, nonselective, low-endowment colleges in the Northeast, Midwest, and Middle Atlantic states will close. HBCUs, constrained by declining resources, will struggle even harder to maintain quality and critical mass. In the Sunbelt, there will not be enough higher education to meet the needs of ballooning populations. California alone faces a tidal wave of 500,000 new students.

The problem also has economic and technological components. Higher education is unprepared for a global information economy that will demand lifelong education, higher levels of skills and knowledge, new fields of research and instruction, new staffing patterns, and new relationships with the rest of the nation’s education system. This era will bring increasing competition from for-profit postsecondary educators and international universities. Meanwhile, some of these same competitors are already taking advantage of the gap between our students’ extensive use of digital learning technologies and our institutions’ continuing reliance traditional methods of teaching and learning.

Even with all these external pressures, we have to admit that part of the problem also lies within higher education. Its sectors and purposes have become blurred and confused. Even the California Master Plan is broken. Higher education is seen increasingly as isolated, out of touch, unwilling to serve public needs, self-serving and unable to control its spending. Once higher education stood on a pedestal. It no longer does.

While some of this is misperception, some is real. The truth is that higher education in its current state cannot propel the nation into the 21st century as it spurred national growth after World War II. Current higher education leaders have been and will continue to be unable to spearhead this effort. Their focus is short-term, concerned principally with preserving the status quo. The mission of higher education, the structure of higher education, the financing of higher education, and the public policies that this will require need to be rethought and reformulated.

Although I am in general not a big fan of commissions, committees, and reports--most of which amount to a single day’s press coverage--it is time for new leadership to take a hard look at American higher education. Right now, with a still-new administration in Washington digging in on education issues, this is the moment to muster such leadership.

To succeed, the new commission would need the same kind of focused but limited membership I proposed in a previous call for a higher education summit : representatives of the major sectors of higher education, plus key state and federal leaders, but not so many as to make its administration unwieldy or slow. Most important, it needs the kind of Presidential mandate for change that the Truman Commission had from the outset.

More than at any point in recent memory, national leadership now seems to understand that we have to fix higher ed--primarily by attending to access and preparation--in order to get back to #1. The need for a new Truman Commission couldn’t be more urgent, and the time is right.

Arthur Levine is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Last week I participated in the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, an event that featured more than 1,000 participants from 150+ nations--a veritable who’s who of higher education leaders from across the globe. The event gave me an opportunity to reflect, in a concrete way, on what it means to be the “best in the world” in college degree attainment.

Getting to this goal -- which Lumina Foundation for Education has articulated as increasing the nation’s level of high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% by 2025 -- is more than simply an organizing principle. As President Obama has said, college success is not just a pathway to opportunity, it’s a prerequisite. If followed, the path leads to jobs, the jobs lead to prosperity, and prosperity leads to economic and social stability for individual Americans and for the country at large. The Administration’s new major initiative on community colleges reinforces the view that this President will try to exhibit leadership that can make a palpable difference in boosting student success rates.

The American participants at the World Conference included some of the nation’s leading higher education voices, including Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padron, University of Nebraska President J.B. Milliken, ACE President Molly Broad, CHEA President Judith Eaton, and a distinguished government delegation headed by new Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. These leaders, and the many other participants, seem to be increasingly clear in their understanding that the knowledge economy requires Americans to develop the skills that are demanded in a globally competitive environment. As a result, increasing higher education attainment is critical to the U.S. economy.

The implications of this shift toward a more highly skilled workforce cannot be overstated. For generations, the American economy created large numbers of middle class jobs that did not require high levels of skill or knowledge. Because of global competition, these jobs are rapidly disappearing. It is not that low-skill jobs do not exist in the U.S.; it is that the Americans who hold them are not likely to enter or remain in the middle class. They are not likely to have access to quality health care, save for retirement or assure their children access to higher education.

A clear message that was repeated throughout much of the discussion at the World Conference was that many nations now understand that a society made up of large number of individuals with meaningful, high-quality degrees and credentials enables those nations to be economically, socially, and culturally successful. This is one reason why other parts of the world are working to raise attainment—and why we need to pay attention to what they’re doing.

The American public has rapidly come to this same conclusion. Americans have always valued higher education and been aware that it delivers significant economic and social benefits. But they never really believed it was a necessity – until now. Fifty-five percent of Americans now believe that obtaining a college degree is the only way to succeed. As recently as 2000, only 30 percent of Americans believed that. Unfortunately, many in the education and policy worlds fail to understand what their constituencies see very clearly. Too often we continue to hear debates about who is or isn’t “college material.”

So why should we care about the educational attainment of other nations? One reason is that there is clear evidence that rising attainment rates in other countries reflect genuine economic demand for a better-educated workforce. In 29 of the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the gap in earnings between people who have completed some form of higher education and those who have not is widening, even though the proportion of college graduates in the workforce is increasing. If the economy were not demanding higher levels of skills and knowledge, this earnings gap would narrow as the supply of graduates increased; it’s simple supply and demand.

The widening earnings gap is evident in the U.S. as well. Since 1975, average annual earnings of high school dropouts and high school graduates fell in real terms (by 15 percent and 1 percent respectively), while those of college graduates rose by 19 percent. In other words, the economic benefits – both for individuals and the society – of completing higher education are growing.

It’s not that the U.S. needs to increase higher education attainment simply because of our ranking in international comparisons. However, it is vitally important that we be clear about what we know with certainty about higher education attainment. Higher education attainment in the U.S. – the percent of the American population with a postsecondary credential or degree – has remained flat for 40 years, in spite of the dramatic economic and social changes during that period. Meantime, higher education attainment in the rest of the world has increased, in some cases at dramatic rates. I believe this reflects a fundamental change in the role higher education plays in advanced economies – a change that the U.S. ignores at its peril.

Jamie P. Merisotis is president of the Lumina Foundation for Education