Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"We're considered one of the top countries in terms of the quality of our higher education. If you look around college campuses like I do, you see a lot of foreign students. Students are coming here because they know they get a quality education in our four-year institutions. One of the reasons I think we have high-quality higher education institutions is because we spend a lot more money on them than the average country. And the latest data that we have, which is for 2005, the U.S. spend almost 3 percent of our collective income, our gross domestic product, on higher education. Among developed countries, the next highest country was Sweden at 1.7 percent. So we're at 3 percent, and number two is at 1.7 percent, so we're almost double number two. Britain was at 1.4 percent, Germany at 1.2 percent. Now these numbers are for total spending on higher education, including both spending by the government as well as spending by the students or their families. In the U.S., about one third of the spending is from government; about two-thirds is from the private sector. Now if you look at just the government part, though, the U.S. does lag these other countries."