The fraction of 18- and 19-year-old high school graduates who are enrolled in college rose from around 50 percent in 1980 to nearly 70 percent today. Even the good news must be qualified, however, since half this rise took place in the 1980s, and the pace of increase has slowed since then.
As Chairman Bernanke and others have noted, we cannot afford to ignore the health of financial markets when setting monetary policy. It would be difficult to disagree with this statement, and we should try to make it operational considering however that its application may have different degrees of intensity.