Completing a college degree, or failing to, is a major factor in determining whether a person will have an economically stable future. While it might have been possible a few decades ago to graduate from high school, enter the job market, and find a career that enabled one to earn a solid middle-class life, that path to success has been almost completely foreclosed by the changing nature of the nation's Yet right now, a student who enrolls in higher education has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating. Society can no longer afford to overlook that fact--or act as if it is inevitable. Completion matters to students; it matters to taxpayers; and there is a lot that institutions and the government can do to address the nation's dismal higher-education dropout rates. In this forum, Lanae Erickson of the think tank Third Way lays out the case for using federal leverage and other means to get institutions to boost their completion rates. [For "Should Congress Link Higher-Ed Funding to Graduation Rates? Debating the Use of Degree Completion as an Accountability Metric," see EJ1235168.]