Rich Vedder, who has done as much as anyone to challenge the conventional wisdom that the more people who get college degrees, the better, here reviews The Race Between Technology and Education by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, a book that seems to support the conventional wisdom.

Goldin and Katz try to show that economic progress depends on getting more people highly trained so that they’re able to make use of our ever-improving technology. Vedder questions whether going to college is the best way to acquire whatever skills are needed.

I think that Goldin and Katz overestimate the extent to which the labor force is changing to require skills and knowledge that can only be learned in college classrooms (which isn’t the same as using college credentials as a screening mechanism), and that they also overestimate the extent to which the typical student gains useful skills and knowledge from his coursework. There are great numbers of young Americans who go through college and emerge without even much advance in basic skills (reading, writing, math), much less high-level training in advanced fields.