Consider what has happened to education in America over the past 70 years.
In the 1950s and 1960s, education was one of the nation’s largest fields of study. In 1949–50, colleges awarded more than 61,000 bachelor’s degrees in education. By 1969–70, that number had climbed to nearly 164,000. In the early 1970s when our total population was about 200 million, it peaked at more than 190,000. Education was number one!
Then the trajectory changed.
Business moved ahead, and the gap continued to grow. By 1980–81, more than 200,000 business degrees were being awarded while education had fallen substantially. By 1990, business was approaching 250,000 degrees while education remained around 110,000. The divergence continued for decades.
In 2019–20, American colleges awarded about 85,000 education bachelor’s degrees, compared with nearly 388,000 business degrees. In 2021–22, education accounted for 89,410 bachelor’s degrees, while business accounted for 375,418.
Think about that. The number of education degrees today is roughly half what it was at its peak more than 50 years ago, even though the United States has added 140 million people to its population since then.
That is not a minor trend. It should concern every one of us. The statistics scare me. Do they scare you?
The numbers don’t tell us exactly why young people are choosing other fields. Compensation and working conditions matter. So do the increasing demands placed on teachers, political and cultural battles surrounding schools and the expanding opportunities in other professions.
But I believe there is a bigger issue: our education system has not changed fast enough to keep up with the world around it.
And that brings me to New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has been a national leader in education redesign. In December 2024, the National Center for Competency-Based Learning , the nonprofit that I head, helped lead the effort to rewrite the state’s Minimum Standards for Public School Approval — the regulations that govern our K-12 system. The process was contentious. There was significant opposition to what some characterized as wholesale changes.
At one point, a reporter asked me about someone who had said we were trying to “destroy public education as we know it.”
My response was:“Guilty as charged.”
The important words were “as we know it” because I believe the system as we know it doesn’t work for too many kids.
For years, folks have complained about burdensome regulations as an obstacle to innovation. In New Hampshire, we have now transformed many of those rules. The new standards create greater flexibility for schools to rethink how they organize learning and provide opportunities for students. Now we have to use that flexibility.
This past August, I attended the New Hampshire Secondary Innovation Project at Gilford High School, where five school districts came together to explore new possibilities using the state’s new regulations as their foundation. What struck me was not simply that educators were trying something different. It was that they were beginning to see possibilities.
And they aren’t alone. Districts around New Hampshire are beginning to discover what can happen when the rules give educators room to innovate. That should encourage us.
But it should also make us ask a much harder question: If we have created the flexibility to change schools, are we moving fast enough to take advantage of it? I don’t think we are. We cannot have one foot in the 21st century and the other in the 20th.
Our children are entering a world being transformed by artificial intelligence, technology, changing workplaces and unprecedented access to information. The skills they need are changing. The nature of work is changing. The nature of citizenship is changing. Yet much of the structure of school remains remarkably familiar.
We still organize students largely by age, learning around courses and semesters, and progress around credits and seat time. Competency-based education was an important step toward changing that. But it cannot simply become another layer placed on top of the old system. We need to think bigger — and we need to move faster because the stakes are enormous.
When young people increasingly choose other professions over education, when too many students disengage from school, and when a system designed for another era struggles to prepare students for the world they are actually entering, we are not dealing with a minor problem. It is no surprise that the education profession simply is not nearly as attractive as it once was. We are talking about the future of public education itself. And that is why I am increasingly concerned.
Are we on a path to losing public education? I don’t want that to happen. I believe passionately in public education and in its role as one of the few institutions that belongs to all of us. But preserving public education cannot mean preserving the system “as we know it.”
We need to make school an exciting place to be for every kid. I have ideas about how we might do that. So do many other people. There are teachers doing some remarkable things, superintendents and principals experimenting with new models, employers who see how quickly the workplace is changing, and parents and community members with perspectives that too often never become part of the conversation.
What we need now is to bring those people together. Not for another study or another report. Not for another initiative layered onto an already complicated system. We need an organized, statewide conversation about the future of public education in New Hampshire; a serious conversation about what school should look like if we were designing it today for the world our children will actually inherit.
New Hampshire has already taken an important step by changing the rules. Now we need to change what we do with them. The Innovations Project in the Lakes Region is a good start.
Let’s bring peoples’ ideas together. We have an opportunity. But the opportunity won’t wait forever. Let’s do it now.
Fred Bramante is a past chairman of the NH State Board of Education and a former candidate for governor. He lives in Durham.