Last weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Murray at the Philadelpha Society’s regional meeting in Indianapolis. He gave the big Saturday evening talk, and I was on a panel devoted to the economics of higher education with professors Dwight Lee and Richard Vedder.

I mentioned the Winters article to Murray, who told me he had already replied on the American Enterprise Institute blog. In short, he thinks the notion that the country can profitably put a lot more young people through college romantic.

I finally got around to reading the piece myself and was surprised to see that it’s just a repetition of rather musty ideas, such as that the college “premium” shows that employers have a high demand for the greater knowledge and skills that college supposedly confers. As I have argued for years, that “premium” does not reflect greater productivity on the part of college-degreed people (although of course, some who graduated from college do gain a lot in human capital), but rather that increasingly, employers only offer the better-paying jobs to people with college degrees. Lots of students manage to get through college with little or no improvement in any valuable skills, and what little they may remember from their courses is of scant benefit in most jobs. But the degree does show employers a modicum of perseverance and organization. Given the fact that many young Americans are pretty poor in those characteristics, the degree is a useful screening device. So it’s not so much the case that employers pay more for college degrees as that the avenues into the better-paying jobs have been increasingly closed off to people without them.