In his speech, President Obama, as expected, said that he wants Americans to have more years of formal education, to the point where we have the world’s highest percentage of people with college degrees.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times story on it.

Obama used the line Margaret Spellings used to rely on — that a large percentage (she used to say 90, but he lowered it to 75) of the “fastest growing jobs” require a college education. Even if that’s true — and many jobs “require” a college degree only in the sense that employers won’t consider people who don’t have them, not that the work is so difficult that no one who hasn’t finished college could learn to do it — it does not follow that we need to have more people graduating from college. There is no reason to believe that the current numbers of graduates is insufficient to fill those jobs.

Someone ought to point out to the president that the country already has large numbers of people with college degrees doing jobs that calls for no advanced academic work at all.

Obama seems to think that global economic competition is like a race where you win if you have the workforce with the highest amount of formal education. As I said last month in a talk at Cato Institute, we aren’t in a race and don’t have to be first.

He also seems to think that obtaining a college degree necessarily means a gain in human capital, but with academic standards where they are at many institutions, that just isn’t true. For many students (or “tuitioners” as a friend suggests) college is just four or more years of, as Murray Sperber puts it, beer and circus.