We hear this argument all the time from pseudo-economists like Madrick and spokespeople for the higher education establishment: We need to invest more in college education for our young people.

Fact number one about this alleged need is that almost every young American who is remotely qualified to attend college now does so. That was the finding of a study done by Jay Greene and Greg Forster of the Manhattan Institute, based on Department of Education data. You can read it here. They found that (using data from 2000) there were about 1.2 million young Americans who were qualified to go to college. (That is, had completed high school and had taken SAT or ACT.) In that year, colleges enrolled 1.3 million American students. (The “nonselective” colleges don’t just scrape the bottom of the barrel, but gouge out some of the wood, too.) So it just isn’t the case that significant numbers of qualified students are being kept out of college.

Fact number two is that average earnings between those who graduated from college and those who didn’t is a misleading and irrelevant statistic. The earnings of college grads are greatly increased by the presence of people like, oh, John Kerry and John Edwards, not to mention Michael Jordan. On the other hand, the average earnings of non-graduates are depressed by the presence of many people who aren’t working much and earn very little. Rather than looking at averages and thinking,”Golly — if only we could get more people through college, earnings and taxable income would rise!” you need to look at the margins. How much would the earnings of a person who decided not to go to college, but instead to get a job driving a truck, in construction, or doing lots of similar jobs, be increased if he had instead gone to college?

The answer is probably zero. We already have quite a number of college graduates who have had to take “high school” jobs like selling video games in mall stores because their college experience did not equip them for anything better. Pulling more of the marginal students into college will simply waste time and money. Madrick’s idea that going to college is a cure-all for every economic malady is so loony that I’m surprised that the editors — even at the NYT– didn’t say, “Oh, come on….”