Although legal requirements vary by region, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada all permit home-schooling. The number of home-schooled children ranges in the tens of thousands in each country, but the groups are growing.

  In a number of countries, home-schooling seems to take place a bit under the radar.

  Japan’s Education Ministry does not acknowledge home-schooling as a viable educational option, and can prosecute parents who keep their children at home. Nonetheless, unofficial estimates put the number of Japanese home-schooled students at 2,000 to 3,000.

  In Israel, the Compulsory Education Law requires all children to attend school. That being said, exemptions are obtainable via a long and complicated bureaucratic process.

  China legally requires all children to attend school, but existence of the Shanghai Home-School Association is evidence that some families slip through the cracks.

  Germany has strictly required compulsory school attendance since 1938, and goes to great lengths to enforce the law. In 2006, the German government put a father in jail for six weeks for home-schooling, and in 2007 put one girl in a mental institution with the diagnosis of “school phobia.” The European Human Rights Court has ruled in favor of Germany’s compulsory schooling bill.

  Why home-school? Many parents cite the same reasons as Americans: fear of schoolyard bullying, concern over the declining quality of education, and the desire to give children a more religious education than public schools can. And by the way, that’s not just Christians. A new Web site called the Muslim Homeschool Network and Resource provides information to home-schooling Muslims in the U.S. and Canada.

  Although the Internet cannot be credited for sparking the home-school trend, it has certainly catalyzed its adoption across the globe. America’s home-school materials suddenly have a growing international market, as well as the surging market here.

  College Dropouts

  What do Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, Karl Rove, and Yoko Ono have in common?

  They all dropped out of college.

  They said—college is too slow for me, I should get right out into the real world faster. Well, more and more people are following this track—but most often, they needed the last few years in college to really get ahead.

  The good news from the college front is that higher-ed enrollment is higher than ever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 69 percent of students who graduated from high school in 2005 were enrolled in college the following October. That was up from 59 percent in 1988, and up from 47 percent in 1973. Indeed, a record-high 54 percent of all Americans have been to some college. For the first time in American history, going to college is a majority expectation for families—most kids will start college—and over two-thirds of high school grads will. This means that while high school used to mark the end of state-sponsored education, today a basic education includes a year or two of college.

  But for all the growth in college enrollment, college graduation rates have stayed about the same—about 66 percent for students in four-year institutions. And dramatically lower for community colleges and online colleges. Which means that while more Americans than ever are entering college—and graduating—there are also more Americans than ever dropping out, “stopping out” (which is what they call taking a break with an intent to go back), or being “academically dismissed” (which is what they call getting booted). The latter, apparently, is what Woody Allen and Ted Turner have in common.

  According to a 2005 article in the New York Times, almost 1 in 3 Americans in their mid-20s are now college dropouts, up from 1 in 5 in the late 1960s, when the Census Bureau started keeping that data. So the biggest national source of educational underperformance has quietly shifted from high school dropouts, and the need to get them to return to high school, to college dropouts, and the need to help them finish their education.

  Sources: Institute for Higher Education Policy, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006

  Rampant college dropouts mean fewer people qualified to be teachers, fewer engineers, and fewer FBI agents than we were expecting given how college enrollment has soared. And dropouts are rising. In the decade between 1996 and 2006, America produced something like 28 million college dropouts—a population larger than the entire country of Venezuela.

  Who are America’s college dropouts?

  It is tempting to romanticize them as the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs/Michael Dell–type of dropouts—entrepreneurs with bold ideas who just couldn’t sit through four whole years of lectures by minds smaller than theirs. And the truth is, the list of famous college dropouts in America is so large, and so entertaining (Rosie O’Donnell, Nina Totenberg, Rush Limbaugh . . .), that it can start to make you wonder if you, too, could have founded a global computer company or been a talk-radio superstar if only you hadn’t slogged through the extra years of business marketing and Psychology 202. (Tucker Carlson, John Malkovich, Barry Goldwater, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edgar Allan Poe . . .)

  But the truth is, most people who drop out do so for more pedestrian reasons—usually money. Even if they can eke out the college tuition, they generally need a job to pay for the rest of the expenses of life—or simply because their family needs them and can’t wait. And as you might expect, those coming from poorer backgrounds—those who are proudest to go to college in the first place—are the first to answer the practical call to support their families. For those who remember Spencer’s Mountain (starring Henry Fonda in 1963), college in America, with its rising costs, may still mean parents have to give up their own dreams if they are to get large families to and through college.

  But while for many years we have recognized the social costs of high school dropouts, we seem to have ignored the enormous and growing national costs of college dropouts. Nongraduation is very expensive. First, there are costs to the students themselves, like lower earnings. A bachelor’s degree holder earns nearly twice what the high school diploma holder earns in a year, and nearly $1 million more over a lifetime.

  But then there are the costs to the rest of us. College dropouts are arguably America’s greatest untapped resource—the ones who are prepared for college, but in the end, don’t make that million-dollar difference. And so they pay less in taxes, offer less in ingenuity, and are statistically linked to poorer health, more crime, more divorce, less civic participation, and less volunteerism.

  We even pay in the short term. According to a 2005 study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, half of America’s starting freshmen borrow, and 20 percent of the borrowers drop out. That’s a lot of defaulted loans. In 2001, there were more than 350,000 ex-students who had begun college six years before, but now had no certificate or degree and little hope of repaying their debt. The New York Post declared in 2004 that in the prior five years, college students had wasted more than $300 million in state money by failing to graduate.

  Not only are college dropouts a waste of American potential—but it’s about to get worse. Between 1995 and 2015, the number of undergraduate students in America is predicted to increase by 19 percent, to 16 million. Eighty percent of the new students will be students of color, and many will be low-income and/or first-generation college-goers. If the dropout and stop-out rate merely stays constant, there will be something like 1 million additional Americans every year prepared to do college-level work but not doing it.

  And these are the folks who wanted very much to be there. Nearly 6 in 10 college dropouts say they still hope to finish college. Nearly 7 in 10 say they’d have better jobs if they had finished college, and 74 percent say they would be financially better off.

  So this is one of those small trends with big national costs. Hovering under the radar for now, it is failing to spawn the industry of government programs, PR alliances (“Got Degree?”), public-private partnerships, or even late-night infomercials that it should.

  U.S. News & World Report should be ranking colleges on retention rates, not just admission rates. And not just the retention rates of nonscholarship candidates; every student taking a loan or a grant should know his or her odds of graduating from that college. Educate students up front not just about starting, and adjusting to, college—but about what it is going to take to get through college. And programs like the Teacher Corps can focus on those who are having trouble getting through for financial and family reasons.

  A mind is still a terrible thing to waste—and the PR machine that decades ago told people that getting to college was everything now has to refocus some of its energies on getting students through college. College graduation rates will probably be the most important indicator of whether the U.S. will be able to keep up with emerging Chinese and Indian economies that are turning out millions of competing graduates. And at least one of those techno-geek college dropouts needs to look around and invent the online program for finishing the college degree. As noted earlier, America’s best professors’ lectures are already on tape, and online courses are being developed in almost every subject. If a serious number of American students can’t get back to school, then school better find its back way to them—on the Web, when the rest of the family has gone to sleep. Just as we once needed high school equivalency tests, now we need online college equivalency exams. For better or for worse, the market is there, and it is growing.

  Numbers Junkies

  Americans love numbers—they just don’t like arithmetic.

  We study less and less math and science in the universities, as more and more students choose fields like psychology. But we are fascinated by the mathematical underpinnings of our daily lives. We may have fewer numbers experts, but we have more Numbers Junkies.

  When Larry Summers became president of Harvard in 2001, he told his university community that they lived in a society where few people would admit “to not having read any plays by Shakespeare . . . but where it is all too . . . acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth.” And to be sure, at Harvard today, there are only seventy-seven math majors—out of over 6,700 undergraduates. Yale has thirty-eight. That means that this year, these two universities will graduate fewer than fifty people who really understand the ins and outs of higher math.

  America has often imported its most brilliant math and science talent. Albert Einstein came from Germany when Hitler took over. Dr. Wernher Von Braun, also from Germany, helped us with our first rockets. While there have been classic American inventors, like Thomas Edison, top math and science people in America have not always been American.

  In 2001, a bipartisan commission on American National Security said that the second greatest threat to American national security—behind only terrorist attacks—was the threat of failing to provide sufficient math and science education in America. In 2006 and 2007, Craig Barrett of Intel and Bill Gates of Microsoft testified before Congress that we urgently need more graduates in these fields, and that we will either have to draw from the world’s new supply, or face critical infrastructure shortages.

  Clearly, degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (known as STEM) are falling, as a proportion of all postsecondary degrees awarded. In the academic year 2003–04, STEM degrees made up 27 percent of awarded degrees, down from 32 percent just ten years before. And many of those spots are filled not by Americans, but by foreign students using HB-1 visas to complete their education here. By contrast, in China and India, Shakespeare is not as popular as Niels Bohr, but those nations say that they are graduating as many as 950,000 engineers a year. In those countries, the study of math and science is cool—it is seen as the road to a better future. Here, it’s not so cool.

  But for all the sobering truths about math and science degrees in America, it is also true that the U.S. today is experiencing a growing, and intense, popular fascination with math, science, medicine, and technology. According to a 2007 analysis in Popular Science, in this year’s television season, there are at least fifteen successful prime-time dramas on the big four networks alone that heavily feature math and science. In the entire decade of the 1990s, there were only ten.

  The “it” shows range from the blockbuster CSI on CBS, in which forensic scientists in the Las Vegas Police Department solve crimes by reconstructing murder scenes, deducing bullet trajectories, and analyzing blood spatter patterns; to the more niche-y House on Fox, in which a genius but ill-tempered Dr. Gregory House spots medical ailments by finding clues about patient behavior that even the patients themselves won’t admit. But the appeal goes beyond just medical examiners and practitioners. One of the hottest new shows, with 11 million viewers, is CBS’s Numb3rs, in which a math genius helps his FBI-agent brother solve crimes using some of the most sophisticated mathematical theorems out there. Indeed, math and numbers have become so ingrained in our modern TV culture that a California reporter called in 2006 for an “Integer Alert”—as something like ten new titles on TV this season are using them, from The Nine to 3 Lbs. to Six Degrees to 30 Rock. (The 2007 movies 300 and The Number 23 reflect the same integer excitement.)

  Sure, science has always been a big part of pop culture, especially in crime-fighting. Sherlock Holmes was the king of science-usefully-applied-to-crime. In the James Bond movies—beyond the women and the fight scenes—one of the highlights of nearly every film is Bond’s visit to the labs of Agent Q, who shows off the latest technological inventions that (lo and behold) come in perfectly handy later on. And of course, Quincy got all this forensic frenzy started back in the 1970s.

  And, to be fair, to whatever degree modern generations of kids have grown up on Barbies and fire trucks, they have also grown up on chemistry sets, Operation, Slinkys, and Rubik’s Cube.

  But without a doubt, in the past fifteen years, science has gotten a big boost. Educators from Carl Sagan to Bill Nye the Science Guy to even Al Gore have done significant work to bring complex science to America in terms and pictures that everyone can understand. And in movies like 1997’s Good Will Hunting and 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, we learned to find math and science geniuses wildly compelling. Then came Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics—and suddenly it seemed like no one in America wasn’t fascinated with number series, math magic, and data analysis.

  But what’s happening today is even one step beyond that. Numb3rs alone has 11 million people flocking to it on Friday nights not in spite of the math, but because of it. When the show was tested with audiences using dials to indicate when their interest was really piqued, the viewers went wild for the math explanations. Why? The explanations made them feel smart, they said.

  In many ways, science and technology in America are no longer focused as much on putting men on the moon, or building the world’s tallest buildings, so much as they are focused on how to use more Space Ice Cream (the freeze-dried ice cream invented for the astronauts). More and more, we use numbers and technology in our daily experiences, and understanding them and their applications fascinates us. There is more computing power in a Ford car today than fueled the first rocket into space. Our washing machines are becoming computerized. Science and technology are all around us, and we want it demystified.

  Look at what has happened to polls. When I started in this business, only the Rockefellers could afford polls—they were hugely expensive, since they were done door-to-door. Now there is a poll done every three days by the major news outfits. We are being saturated with numbers, and the news organizations are pursuing them especially hard because they sell so much better than yet another story on the bombings in Iraq.

  At the same time, as more serious news organizations are beefing up their polling, many other organizations are doing “phone-in polls,” some of which even earn them a profit from the phone company. This is not real polling, and has no methodological integrity. Moreover, the questions are often slanted to produce a certain result. It is sad that after all that has been developed in the real science of learning what the public thinks, so many TV news and entertainment shows accept techniques that appear scientific, but are not at all. I have seen straight-faced presentations of numbers that may as well have been cooked up in the back.

  And most people don’t want just the numbers, they want the “aha” from the numbers—they want the analysis and interpretation that give them the satisfaction of turning numbers into ideas. Of course, that is what this book is all about. Behind every trend, there is a reason to be ferreted out, and implications that flow from what people are doing. If Americans keep on working, or teens keep on knitting, there will be changes and consequences from these trends far beyond just the observation. That is why I have tried to be thorough in describing each of these trends, and in thinking through their potential meaning and implications.

  Given all the numbers fascination, is America actually at the cusp of reversing the anti-science trend that both security experts and public intellectuals have warned about—or are we just attracted to math and science so long as it’s fun and games? TV and movies, yes, but college courses and careers—no thanks? I’m not sure yet that ER and CSI are sending folks in droves to study chemistry (even though L.A. Law once pumped up law school applications). Yes, science summer camps are rising—but schools like MIT seem to be going the opposite direction, and considering revamping their curricula to appeal to more mainstream students. Are math and science making a comeback or not?

  I recently interviewed one of the heads of the math department at Yale, and he said that the American who made the most money last year—$1.5 billion—was a math major. He was referring to a hedge fund manager who based the success of his fund on his calculations. His point was that there is plenty of money in math. So the popular interest in numbers is encouraging, and I hope books like this will get people thinking about the meaning of numbers.