Lack of education in the United States is a major issue that needs to be dealt with immediately; however, the education system needs to be restructured so that the emphasis of academic institutions is on skills and creating multiple different pathways for citizens. For example, high school should end at 16, and students should be able to enter into community college after high school to speed up the educational process and give these students the opportunity to specialize much earlier. This would allow students to be able to customize their education to their perceived career goals, which would give students a greater perspective as to whether or not they need to enter a university. The lack of motivation in the United States is due to the lack of unified purpose among the population. What is the eventual goal for the country? What new, imaginative project are we collectively and individually working towards as a society? With the end of the Cold War, the United States lost its purpose of containing Communism and lost its urgency for mass innovation. This, of course, does not mean that inovation did not take place, but it did mean that the country lost its need to compete, which made the country complacent. Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, drastically reduced government spending for the military and advanced research agencies such as NASA. The government no longer drove institutions towards a higher purpose of survival and the United States was drunk on its own success. A consensus took shape that the fall of the Soviet Union symoblized the end of ideological history with liberal democracies reigning supreme. Terrorism in the early 2000s created a new purpose for the United States, but the controversaries surrounding nation building projects in the Middle East and Central Asia undermined this sense of unity. After terrorism, there has been no unifying purpose to drive the American populous forward. Expansions in space technology could capture the minds of Americans; however, space travel has become increasingly disputed in political circles. Critics of this approach feel that the country should fund social welfare projects instead of bankrolling rsky investment that they believe no tangedible returns to the majority of society. However, the previous space race developed transcommunication satellites, which led to the innovations of the internet and phones. A second space race could give the country massive technological benefits, while simultaneously granting American society a unifying purpose.