The higher-education establishment would love to see its market saturation increase, and it resorts to weak arguments to persuade people that what’s good for Ohio State is good for the country. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal included this piece pitching the line that the economy will improve if we manage to get more people through college.

Here is my letter in response:

This was one of the least persuasive pieces you’ve published in many years.
The great success of our economy was never due to the fact that a relatively high percentage Americans obtained college degrees compared with other nations. The U.S. had a more robust and innovative economy than anywhere else in the world long before our post-World War II emphasis on college credentials because our economy was more free of the stultifying taxes, regulations and governmental drag on production and trade found elsewhere. That, not college degrees, was the reason for our prosperity.
McPherson and Schulenberger credulously believe that national economic success is directly tied to the percentage of people who have college degrees and say that we’ll underperform unless we get to 55 percent. Nonsense. A large percentage of college students enter with feeble academic skills and graduate without much improvement. Many lower-tier colleges and universities admit almost anyone who applies, then accommodate the weakness and intellectual disengagement of most students with curricula that make it easy for everyone with a modicum of persistence to graduate. When those students enter the labor market, many find that the best they can do is to compete for mundane jobs that call for nothing more than simple trainability.
We already have lots of bartenders, pizza delivery drivers, and aerobics instructors with college credentials to their name. Why do we need to devote additional resources to producing more of them?
There’s a central planning mindset on display in this article — that experts know the ideal percentage of people who should have college degrees. We’d be much better off if we stopped subsidizing higher (or more accurately in most cases, “longer”) education and left it to individuals decide whether their expected benefits are worth the cost.
George C. Leef
Director of Research
Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
Raleigh, NC