Chicago Tribune writer Greg Burns has a piece on the prospect of a college bubble — the notion that costs have raced so far beyond the now-much-more-limited ability of many families to pay that some schools are in jeopardy.

The story is good as far as it goes, but Burns only sees the obvious cost aspect of the problem. He misses the value aspect, namely that many college graduates are now finding that their degrees don’t necessarily get them anywhere in the labor market. Burns repeats the conventional wisdom that a degree “translates into higher lifetime earnings.” As I’ve often written, that’s not always the case. The labor market is glutted with people holding college credentials, and many of them end up competing for “high school” jobs.