Brookings Institution fellow Russ Whitehurst here takes a dim view of Obama’s call for increasing America’s college-graduation rate so we’ll “lead the world.”

Whitehurst points out that having a lot of college graduates is neither necessary nor sufficient for a robust economy, writing:

The relationship between years of schooling and economic output at the national level is complex, to say the least. A small but consistently positive relationship between long-term growth and years of schooling is found in econometric studies, but there are many caveats and exceptions that are relevant to designing higher education policy in the U.S. For one thing there is tremendous variability in the relationship. For example, Germany has a stronger economy than France but half the percentage of young adults with a college degree. Further, France has increased its percentage of young adults with college degrees by 13 percentage points in the last 10 years whereas Germany’s output of college graduates has hardly budged, yet the economic growth rate of Germany has exceeded that of France over this same period. Obviously increasing educational attainment is not a magic bullet for economic growth.

I’ll just add this point. We have all heard about many cases where people who have college degrees (including MAs and Ph.D.s) are doing jobs that most high-school graduates could do, but how many instances are there where businesses abandoned investment projects on the grounds that they didn’t think they’d be able to find enough competent employees?