Saturday’s Wall Street Journal contained an editorial, Getting Into Harvard,

that repeats one of the most often heard of all educational statistics — that people who have college degrees earn significantly more than people who don’t. The statistic isn’t erroneous, but misleads people into thinking that there is some necessarily, cause-and-effect relationship between the length of one’s formal education and his earnings.

First, the data include those who earned their degrees years ago, prior to

the erosion of academic standards and the degradation of the curriculum

that has been accelerating over the last few decades. As the recent

National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows, the literacy of college

graduates has been declining. For example, today, only 31% of college

graduates reach the “proficient” level with regard to their comprehension of

prose, compared with 40% in 1992. Not coincidentally, there is evidence

that increasing percentages of people who obtain college degrees wind up

taking “high school jobs” anyway. For many marginal students who get their

college degrees today, there may be negligible benefit to their costly years

in college.

Second, the gap between the earnings of college graduates and non-graduates

is in part attributable to credential inflation rather than human capital

gains. Due to the large numbers of college graduates these days, many

employers have settled upon the BA as a screening device. With a huge pool

of grads searching for work, employers have concluded that they can filter

out people who ended their formal education with high school — people who

are presumably going to be more difficult to train — without losing many

good prospects. As more and more career ladders are foreclosed to those

without degrees, it’s inevitable that the earnings gap will widen. Such

credential inflation, however, is extremely costly — four or more years of

college merely to be certified as employable in simple, entry level jobs

that don’t call for any particular mental acuity.

The trouble with our efforts at making college almost universal is that we

encourage many young people to enroll who are not really interested in

academic pursuits. In order to keep such students in school, institutions

water down their standards and introduce courses that are more for

entertainment than education. As far as our “investment” in higher education

goes, it seems that we are past the point of diminishing returns.