I also read Tom Wood’s essay and remain convinced that for many young Americans, college is a poor use of time and money. The question is not whether they gain any useful skills and knowledge (AKA human capital) while in college, but whether they gain significantly more than they would if they were doing something else during those crucial early-adult years following high school. Undoubtedly there are some who greatly augment their human capital through their college work — more than if they had gotten a job and learned what they wanted to on their own. Just as certainly, there are many who are content just to coast along and obtain their degrees with a minimum of effort. For the time it takes to accumulate enough credits to graduate, their minds are pretty much in neutral, at least with regard to coursework. Maybe they are mentally engaged with other things, but hardly at all with their college classes. I used to teach some of the former kind of student and more of the latter.

The big omission in the essay, I think, was acknowledgement of the fact that large numbers of people with college degrees end up with jobs that could be done by people with far less formal education — jobs such as customer-service representative or rental-car clerk. Sometimes employers insist on college credentials for applicants, and that seems strong evidence that college degrees are often valuable only because they get you past the employer’s initial screening device. Not much of a return on investment in such cases. And where college grads are hired for jobs that are also done by people with lower formal education attainment (e.g., pizza deliverers), it’s hard to see any pecuniary value in the educational “investment.” Perhaps there are non-pecuniary benefits that make the sheepskin worthwhile, though.