Unless it significantly boosts its number of college graduates, the United States will lag behind many other industrialized nations in the global economy.

(This includes both two-year and four-year degrees.)

"We believe there is a real and growing productivity problem in the United States," the report's author, Travis Reindl, told the North Carolina newspaper. "We want more students to and through (college). We want to improve quality. We want to contain the cost."

This challenge is even bigger for Texas, which lags behind the national average for college degrees.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, based on 2000 data, 24.4 percent of Americans aged 25 or older had earned bachelor's degrees. Only 23.2 percent of Texans aged 25 or older had earned bachelor's degrees.

This state's degree gap with the national average - and with industrialized nations - is continuing to worsen.

When he met with the Victoria Advocate editorial board two years ago, Raymund Paredes, the Texas higher education commissioner, noted an important contrast between the nation's two most-populous states.

According to data the National Center for Higher Education Management System compiled from the 2003-04 school year, 51.8 percent of U.S. high school graduates earned bachelor's degrees within six years of high school graduation. In Texas, only 41.4 percent of high school graduates did that.

The state's high school dropout crisis worsens its degree gap.

As many as one-third of the students who should graduate from Texas high schools don't. Instead, they drop out.

Frances Deviney, the director for Texas Kids Count, told Hearst Newspapers that "2.5 million students, twice the population of San Antonio, ... have dropped out of school in the past 20 years."

Each year's high school graduating class has about 120,000 fewer students than started the ninth grade, the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association reported based on data from the Texas Public School Attrition Study for 2005-2006.

By now, readers' eyes may be glazing over with all of these numbers and percentages. While the data are important, the bottom line for Texas - for the future of every person who lives in this state - is even more important.

The bottom line simply is this:

Unless the number of Texans who graduate from high school, then go on to earn college degrees, dramatically increases in the near future, this state will be less and less able to compete effectively even in the national economy, let alone the global economy.

High school diplomas and college degrees do not guarantee success outside the halls of academe.

But lacking them increasingly marks young Texans as unable to perform effectively in an economy that requires these pieces of paper as benchmark qualifications.

Texas and the nation also need to reform the quality of education at all levels to make these pieces of paper more meaningful.

Every policy every local school board in the state considers has to be viewed through the lens of whether it will boost high school graduation rates and boost the quality of education those graduates received.

Every policy every community college and university system board in the state considers has to be viewed through the lens of whether it will boost college graduation rates and boost the quality of education those graduates received.

Every education policy - including funding - the Texas Legislature considers has to be viewed through the lens of whether it will boost high school and college graduation rates and boost the quality of education those graduates received.

Anything else dooms Texas to a long-term economic decline.