Matthew Yglesias ends his recent libertarian streak with a post about higher ed. Key part:

The sentiment that America currently over-invests on education as a whole is just wrong. There’s considerable evidence of a growing college wage premium that began to emerge at just the same time that college graduation rates in this country stopped rising. There’s a race between education and technology and historically broad-based prosperity has been grounded in broad improvements in educational attainment. It’s quite true that we can’t achieve those improvements simply by spending more money, but it’s also true that effective education is very much worth investing in.

A few questions. One: If the college wage premium is rising, why can’t we let that, in and of itself, encourage more people to go to college (and investors to support kids who can’t come up with the money on their own), without government involvement? Two: If the rising college wage premium indicates that we need more college graduates in general, and not just more graduates in specific fields that require high skills, why do so many students who graduate college end up in non-college jobs? Three: How does one square the recommendation of sending more kids to college with the fact that 40 percent of college freshmen don’t graduate in six years?

And four: Isn’t it possible that the college wage premium is rising due to a cap on the supply of intelligence? Couldn’t it be that, as the economy demands more intelligent workers and yet the average IQ doesn’t change, intelligent workers can demand more and more for their skills? Obviously, if that’s the case, if we want the premium to go down, we need to import or create more smart kids, rather than funneling not-smart kids into college programs that either (A) won’t lead to good jobs or (B) are too challenging for them.