Just listened to a podcast from the 2011 meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in which Assistant US Secretary of Education, Edward Ochoa, spoke about some current issues. He illuminated for me, for the first time, the importance of the Lumnia Foundation’s effort to help higher education reach state standards for educational attainment levels.

What I learned from Ochoa’s remarks (the Q&A at the end is the most informative) is this: the US is playing catch-up with Europe. In 1999, the European Higher Education Area started a process of communicating the meaning of degrees between counties and normalizing measures of educational attainment. This process is called the Bologna Process, and the Lumnia Foundation appears to be taking the lead in America’s effort to do the same.

(This work occurs in the context of the Lumnia Foundation’s Goal 2025.)