Two prominent Americans — both from humble roots, both products of the American Dream, both now in their 70s — issued a strong warning last week.

At a meeting sponsored by America’s Promise Alliance, General Colin Powell and Harvard professor and author Robert Putnam predicted dire consequences for individuals and the nation if we don’t do more to maintain education as a path out of poverty for all young people.

“We are moving toward two societies,” Putnam said. On one hand, we have kids growing up in America who will graduate from high school, go on to finish college and ultimately find a good job. On the other, we see kids at risk of dropping out of high school, spending their whole lives struggling to make ends meet at best and ending up in the criminal justice system at worst.

A few hours before Putnam and Powell spoke, America’s Promise released the annual Building a Grad Nation report, written by Civic Enterprises and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.

The two major headlines from the report reinforce the warning. First, high school graduation rates are higher than ever — 81.4 percent nationally. Second, graduation rates for students from low-income families are 15 percentage points lower than those of their more affluent peers.

For many of these kids, family income may have a stronger impact on their futures than individual work ethic. That’s not the American Dream we promised them.

This gap in education and opportunity has serious implications for our economy. When young people disengage from school and work, taxpayers cover the cost in lower economic growth and tax revenues, lost potential earnings and higher government spending. As a recent report from The Urban Alliance put it, “For all disconnected youth in this country, the aggregate taxpayer burden is $1.56 trillion and the social cost is $4.75 trillion.”

Meanwhile, a 2011 report from the Alliance for Excellent Education found that increasing the male graduation rate alone by just five percent would save us $4.9 billion in crime-related costs every year. And we could add 54,000 new jobs and increase the GDP by as much as $9.6 billion just by cutting the dropout rate of a single high school class in half.

Making sure that all kids — regardless of class, color or disability — can graduate high school and have a real shot at their American Dream is a moral and economic imperative for us all.

Thankfully, we know how to bridge this opportunity gap. As Putnam and Powell pointed out, we’ve done it before.

At the end of the 19th century, huge gaps in opportunity and wealth existed between the rich and the poor. Money controlled politics. Technology was disrupting our economy. And white kids spent nearly twice as much time in school as Black kids.

So what changed? To use Putnam’s words, “We invented the high school.”

In the early 20th century, only rich people sent their kids to get a secondary education. But then our economy started to change, and Americans — many of them wealthy lawyers, bankers and philanthropists — believed that investing in universal secondary education for all kids, not just the wealthy or the privileged, would pay off in the long run.

European critics saw this approach as “wasteful.” When most of the world’s educations systems were elite, they criticized ours for becoming egalitarian.

But our critics were wrong. The free, public high school movement contributed to the tremendous amount of economic growth America saw in the 20th century.

This high school movement — which we so often take for granted today — didn’t start in Washington. It started in small towns across America, with everyday, ordinary Americans deciding that building a strong economic future had to start with making sure that all kids had a real shot at their own.

That’s exactly what we need to happen today. Putnam said that the biggest problem we face in closing the opportunity gap isn’t finding the right policy (although we know of several that would help). The most important thing we could do to help the poor is to convince the rich that this problem is their problem.

That’s us. We are the people on the upside of the opportunity gap. Our coworkers, our neighbors, our friends — we’re the ones who can meet this challenge by first and foremost deciding that it’s ours to meet.

This blog originally appeared on Gradnation.org.

John Gomperts is the president & CEO of America’s Promise Alliance, the nation’s largest partnership of organizations, communities and individuals committed to improving the lives of young people, and leader of theGradNation campaign.