In his column today, John Hood discusses a new NBER paper by Robert Gordon. I haven’t read the paper yet, but part of John’s column especially caught my attention — the fact that high living costs in big cities greatly erode the supposed college wage premium.

True, but there is more to the story. There are many college grads working in expensive cities doing jobs that call for no academic study at all. If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site, you’ll find information like this: among ushers, lobby attendants and ticket takers age 25-44, 30 percent have “some college” (that is, went but didn’t graduate) and 17.5 percent have BA degrees or higher.

I don’t think that theaters pay people more to take tickets and show people to their seats just because they have a college degree hanging on the wall.