I haven’t read Kevin Carey’s review yet, but Robert Perry’s is laughable, not only for the reasons Robert gives, but also because Perry makes the silly contention that the United States “needs” more college graduates just because some other countries have edged slightly ahead in the matter of college degrees as a percentage of the population. That’s a bit of folly I criticized here.

He also falls for a factoid that Margaret Spellings has been propounding, namely that “90 percent of the fastest growing job categories” require postsecondary education. The trouble is two-fold. First, there is no reason to believe that we must have an overall expansion in the number of college grads simply because some of the fastest growing job categories call for more than a high school education. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data from which that figure is derived also indicate that most of the expected job growth over the next decade will occur in fields that do not demand any particular level of education, a point I cover in my paper The Overselling of Higher Education.

Second, often when employers say that a job “requires” a college education, that doesn’t mean that the work is so demanding that it just couldn’t be done by a person who had not graduated from college. It just means that the employer has chosen to screen out people without college degrees from consideration on the assumption that they would probably be somewhat more difficult to train.

Finally, Perry thinks that going to college is vital because those who do so become “more skilled.” Some do, but most students spend four, five, or more years in school and when they graduate aren’t even proficient in the fundamentals of language and math. The notion that today’s college grads are finely honed intellectual instruments ready to handle tough challenges is just a lot of education-establishment PR.