The UNC system has put together something called the UNC Tomorrow Commission which is supposed to chart a future course for the state’s higher ed system. According to this story in the N&O, the Commission is hearing from people who want it to expand. No surprise.

Supposedly, the state will “need” 400,000 more workers with college degrees by 2014, but the colleges and universities in the state (public and private) are expected to graduate only 254,000. Therefore, UNC will have to expand, especially to get more minority students through college.

That way of looking at things is, I believe, mistaken.

First, many jobs that “require” a college degree don’t require one in the sense that a person just couldn’t learn to do it unless he had gotten a BA degree. It’s not like saying, “flying an F-16 requires a lot of training.” Instead, many employers have made a college degree a requirement for applicants because there are so many college grads in the labor pool that they can easily screen out all those who don’t have higher education credentials. If we “produce” more college grads, credential requirements will just start to ratchet up further.

Second, rather than looking to the government to create the optimally educated labor force, it makes more sense to assume that individuals will find their own optimal level of human capital, including but not limited to formal schooling. If there are good incentives for people to invest in education and training, they will do so. The state government doesn’t have to attempt to meet any particular level of education and training in the labor force. This is one of those things we can leave up to the invisible hand of the free market.

Third, there is no need to target any segment of the population (e.g., Latino) to increase the percentage of individuals within that segment into college. It’s time to get over the mania for public policy based on group identification. Individuals will make the best decisions they can with regard to their human capital investments and what the percentages might be among whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, left-handers, myopic-Americans, baseball fans who like the DH rule, dog-owners, people who don’t like sweet iced-tea, etc, etc. doesn’t matter in the slightest.