Progress

In a Wall Street Journal column about higher education Jason Riley writes:

In 1970, about 12% of recent college grads came from the bottom 25% of the income distribution. Today, it’s about 10%. “We’ve had a decline in poor people graduating from college. More poor people are attending, but fewer are graduating. We have not really improved making college a vehicle for achieving the American dream.”

And there’s a strong case that the country is already being flooded with college graduates. Even with an unemployment rate below 4%, the number of college graduates is growing faster than the number of jobs requiring a degree. The Great Recession made the mismatch more salient. According to Mr. Vedder, the U.S. had nearly 50% more employed college graduates than it had jobs requiring a college degree by the second decade of the 21st century. More than 13 million bachelor’s degree holders were working jobs that don’t require one.

As the professor sees it, many people who would be better off with a vocational degree or on-the-job training right out of high school are instead pursuing four-year degrees because tuition subsidies have distorted incentives.

I’ve already submitted my proposal for a free college education. A consortium of large states should each close one failing state school (they all have them) and pool the money that would have been spent to create a credentialed, online, degree-awarding baccalaurate program, free to residents of those states and at nominal charge to non-residents. I think the results will be disappointing and not because an online program is inferior but because the idea is an example of cargo cult thinking.

What is presently being put forward as “free” college is actually increasingly expensive college education to be paid for by someone else. Far from producing the educated skilled workers of the future it will merely produce more numerous and more highly paid college administrators.

It will require more to produce the presumably desired result. Most of all we need to start producing more jobs that truly require a college education. I’m not sure what would foster that. Importing foreign-educated workers certainly doesn’t do it. And even then 50% of the population is simply not college material. What’s the plan for them?