Articles on the disconnect between the cost and value of college degrees are popping up everywhere these days. Here is one in the new issue of Business Week (which I understand is on its last legs), where the writer observes that more and more students are finding that they have gone far into debt to get credentials that get them nowhere in the job market. If you read it, you find that she struggled with the decision to pursue graduate studies in business journalism. She already writes well. How much will she learn in a business-journalism program that she wouldn’t have learned just by getting a job in the field? Looks like law school to me — an expensive preliminary to actually learning the job. Would the great writer Henry Hazlitt have been any better if he had gotten some advanced degree in journalism? I think not.

That’s a rather long introduction to the main subject of this post, which is today’s Pope Center Clarion Call. Jane Shaw gives her take on the education-bubble notion and finds that it has merit.

I agree. Government policy led to overinvestment in housing, and it has led to overinvestment in higher ed. In both cases, people were fooled into thinking that something was much more valuable than it really was. The difference, I think, is that although the housing bubble burst, the higher-ed bubble will slowly deflate.