After decades of growth, college enrollments have been falling over the past ten years. A recent AP story says that young Americans are “jaded with education” and are therefore “skipping college.”
For 17 years, I’ve been arguing that higher education is oversold in the U.S. — that because of government subsidies, far more people have been enrolling than otherwise would. Many academically disengaged individuals end up in college more for fun than for any desire for learning. If they graduate, they often wind up in jobs that they could have done while still in high school.
But lots of higher-ed spokesmen have declared that college is essential to success, and Barack Obama opined that our economy would fall behind other countries’ if we didn’t put ever-increasing numbers of young people through college. Since, the reasoning goes, college grads earn (on average) more than high-school grads, college is a great investment both individually and for the nation. Naturally, this line of thinking claims some ink in the story: “It’s [the decline in enrollments] quite a dangerous proposition for the strength of our national economy,” says Zack Mabel, a Georgetown researcher.
Oh, please. This is a welcome market correction. Most college refuseniks would have received scant benefit from four or more costly years on campus, and many others are really smart and ambitious kids who are ready to dive right into the world of work (they’re the sort that Michael Gibson seeks for his 1517 Fund, which I wrote about here).
College, as Bryan Caplan argues in The Case Against Education, is mainly an expensive signaling device. If fewer students go (and, perhaps as a result, fewer people work in colleges), that releases resources for more productive uses — which benefits our economy and society.