The Great Slowdown in the American Education System

I recently discovered a paper by David Card and Thomas Lemieux (NBER, 2000): Dropout and Enrollment Trends in the Post-War Period: What Went Wrong in the 1970s?

Apparently, enrolmant rates in US higher education courses plumetted throughout the 1970's. The authors say that "for women, our results suggest that the slowdown in education in the 1970s was a temporary response to large cohort sizes and low returns to education. For men, however, the decline in enrollment rates in the 1970s and slow recovery in the 1980s point to a permanent shift in the inter-cohort trend in educational attainment that will affect U.S. economic growth and trends in inequality for many decades to come".

I find this quite fascinating, and it is the start of what I hope will be a better understanding of the American education system, to be developed over the coming years.