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 do 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; 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.
