I wish I knew the answer to the question in the title. The College Board has been around so long, and it has been the source of the exams that, years ago, provided a way for smart but low-income students to prove their worth that it has a pretty good image. Yet, like other organizations in the higher-education field, it has its interests to protect. And George Leef argues that it is outdoing itself in its latest study, Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society. His article “College Board Hearts College Bubble” notes some points left out of the report.

One reason for the supposed “earnings premium” is that “credential inflation has spread over the employment landscape just like kudzu over a field.” Not only is the college diploma less valuable than it used to be (and many rosy statistics inevitably reflect the past) but credential inflation has squeezed high-school graduates out of jobs they could otherwise have had. George writes: “The main reason why college appears to confer a big earnings premium is not that graduates are so productive, but rather that fewer and fewer good career paths remain open to people who don’t have college credentials.”

George discusses plenty of other points left out of the report.

One of the most irritating parts of the paper is that it doesn’t cite any of the critics of “college for all,” so someone reading the report can’t easily read the sources that the College Board report dismisses as “anecdotal.” And, finally, the report throws in what I consider red herrings — college students exercise more, smoke less, and are less often on public assistance, etc. As George says, for the most part those are correlations not causation. And, “Tellingly, the authors overlook the possibility that college might cause some students to adopt bad behaviors they might otherwise not have, such as heavy drinking and use of drugs.”