In the course of reporting on some interesting research on the benefits of kindergarten, David Leonhardt of the New York Times goes off on a tangent:

Barely a week seems to go by without a newspaper or television station running a report suggesting that education is overrated. These stories quote liberal groups, like the Economic Policy Institute, that argue that an education can’t protect workers in today’s global economy. Or they quote conservatives, like Charles Murray and Ramesh Ponnuru, who suggest that people who haven’t graduated from college aren’t smart enough to do so.
But the anti-education case usually relies on a combination of anecdotes and selective facts. In truth, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else grew to a record last year, according to the Labor Department, and unemployment has risen far more for the less educated.
This is not simply because smart people — people who would do well no matter what — tend to graduate from college. Education itself can make a difference. A long line of economic research, by Julie Berry Cullen, James Heckman, Philip Oreopoulos and many others, has found as much. The study by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues is the latest piece of evidence.

I have never said “that people who haven’t graduated from college aren’t smart enough to do so,” and don’t believe it. Nor have I ever denied that part of the college wage premium reflects value added in college rather than the intelligence of kids who go to college–which would be a silly thing to deny. I don’t believe that “anti-education” is a reasonable description of my (or Murray’s) position. And I don’t think that this research on the effects of kindergarten has any bearing on my actual position–which is that college isn’t for everyone, and that expanding opportunities for people who do not get college degrees ought to be at least as high a priority as getting more people to go to college. Otherwise, Leonhardt does a nice job.