About a decade ago, I participated in a discussion hosted by the chamber of commerce in a university town about state policies regarding higher education. I’ll never forget the first comment I got from one of the attendees.

“The problem with your presentation,” she said, “is that it didn’t focus enough on college. The jobs in the trades are gone. My father worked for General Motors; those jobs are never coming back.”

This is a common belief, especially in Rust Belt states such as Michigan. It is especially strong among politicians and in the media. Not surprisingly, most people who work in those worlds completed college and have degrees to show for it. It’s only natural for them to assume that this is the best path to prosperity for all.

But the data tell a more complicated story. Since the depths of the Great Recession, many trade jobs — including those in construction, transportation, excavation, the automotive industry, and manufacturing — have increased in number. In some job categories, the number of workers has grown by well over 30 percent.

Assuming that a bachelor’s degree is everyone’s key to economic prosperity reflects a misleading and often harmful mindset. Getting a four-year (or, as is increasingly common, a six-year) degree from a traditional college is but one way to get postsecondary education that can lead to job opportunities. Despite all the efforts to get more students enrolled in college, it still isn’t even the typical career path.

While two-thirds of new high-school graduates head off to college, about 40 percent of them never complete a program. If going to college were run through a cost–benefit analysis, the value wouldn’t be there for nearly half of those admitted.

In other words, for every ten students who go to college, four waste their time and money, unless there’s some value in just attending college. Few employers, though, are impressed by an applicant who went to college but doesn’t have the degree to show for it. Far too often, we focus more attention on getting kids into college than on helping them complete it.

It’s still true that only a minority of American adults — 35 percent — have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Even now, most jobs do not require a college degree. And that’s not even including the many more individuals — more than a third of college graduates, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — who have a college degree but are working in jobs that don’t require it.

The idea that everyone needs to attend a traditional college, or even that most people do, is built on false premises. The thinking typically goes this way: People with college degrees make more money; therefore, everyone should strive after a degree. A policy prescription follows: States should spend more on higher education, because if more people get college degrees, the state’s economy will improve.

It’s true that, on average, people with college degrees make more than those without. But it’s doubtful that what people learn in college leads to higher incomes. For most professions, there is very little connection between what one learns in college and what one does to perform a job.

Instead, what’s probably at play here is that people who finish college are different in important ways from those who do not. To get a degree, one typically has to show up to the workplace (i.e., classroom), complete some assigned projects, and persevere — similar to what one must do on the job. In other words, people who finish college may already be more likely to earn a higher income purely by dint of their character than those who do not.

This is one reason the late economist Armen Alchian argued that college subsidies are highly inefficient, both as an economic-development strategy and as a tool to reduce income inequality. Since the vast majority of people who benefit from state spending on college were already likely to do well in the job market, state subsidies amount to a tax on the poor to support the rich. Alchian encouraged us to think of people capable of graduating from college as being like an oil company sitting on an untapped field. Does the company need subsidies to start drilling?

The idea that simply stockpiling college-educated people within a state to gain prosperity — something my colleague James Hohman refers to as “talent mercantilism” — isn’t supported in the economic data. There is no statistical connection between how much a state spends on higher education and how fast its economy grows.

Further, an analysis of state per capita spending on public colleges and the number of college graduates yields no correlation. When states add jobs, they typically do not just add certain types of jobs, such as high-tech ones or others requiring a college degree. Instead, job growth happens across the board, which suggests that states cannot simply pull on the “more college jobs” lever and expect good things to happen. It’s more complicated than that.

Still, the hyper-focus on “college readiness” lives on.

This mindset has driven many public-policy decisions across the country. Whether it’s changes on the state level in the 1980s, the No Child Left Behind Act of the early 2000s, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, Common Core, or other national educational-reform movements, the focus seems always to be on getting more kids into college.

These changes have had only small effects on the academic performance of K–12 schools, but they have weakened school-based trade programs. Requiring students to take additional courses in core subjects such as math, science, and languages has crowded out career and technical education, resulting in their decades-long decline.

This is unfortunate, because career and technical programs are more successful at preparing people for employment and careers than the college-for-all approach. As the Brookings Institution notes, studies show that school-based trade programs have a mixed record in improving the academic performance of students who participate. But those students do, it adds, have significantly more job opportunities and higher career earnings.

In Michigan, a need for more workers in the trades, and greater interest from students, has led lawmakers to slowly roll back mandates on the courses high-schoolers have to take. It’s now easier for students to spend part of their day in community college or trades programs rather than in, say, an Algebra II course they will likely never use.

One program, the Greater Michigan Construction Academy, has seen 77 percent of its students over a three-year period either gain employment in the trades or go on to college. (Comparably, only 22 percent of Michigan community-college students obtain an associate’s degree or go on to college.)

I’ve noticed in discussions that people often seem to believe that if the state or schools or society did just a bit more to encourage college attendance, we’d see a large increase in the number of highly educated, highly skilled workers in highly paid careers. In other words, more doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers.

But that’s not how it works. The idea that everyone needs to go to college may lead to more people going to college, but not in the ways many advocates intend. Despite many private and public efforts to encourage STEM education, the portion of students getting degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math hasn’t changed much. Increased college enrollments have not led to that many more STEM careers.

High-school graduates who would not have gone to college without having been pushed into it are more likely than others to drop out. These students are particularly harmed by the college-for-all mantra, as they end up wasting their time and their money (and taxpayers’ time and money). Sure, maybe they learned a thing or two and made new friends, but without that degree at the end, they would have been better off spending that time developing experience in a career field or completing a technical-training program.

College-for-all has also done little to make college degrees more accessible. Despite the decades-long attempts to get more people into college, especially those from low-income households, a degree remains a reward that primarily benefits the relatively well-to-do. Economist Richard Vedder notes that the share of college graduates from poor households has dropped from 12 percent in 1970 to 7 percent in 2013

Some people will get a college degree and others won’t, and there’s little that governments can do to change that fact. While they can make college “free” for students, they cannot make students acquire skills and complete their degree. When they don’t, taxpayer money is wasted — a pure deadweight loss.

There’s little evidence that college-for-all brings broad economic benefits, and it’s not the place of politicians to determine which career paths are good and need to be encouraged. Their efforts to push an ever larger number of young adults into college has done more harm than good. It’s time for government, especially state governments, to shift their focus to career readiness. We need to give high-school students more options, not fewer, to freely determine the career path that works for them.