

America May Have Too Many College Graduates - 5foot2
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/america-may-have-too-many-college-graduates/261454/

======
tokenadult
It would certainly be naive in the extreme to suppose that the whole national
economy would improve if every person of working age spent the time, effort,
and money to add one degree to his or her resume. At the individual level of
analysis, in some occupations, a typical degree for that occupation seems to
be all upside for the degree-holder. A commonly made statement in books about
industrial psychology is that an engineer has higher earnings over the course
of a lifetime, adjusted for the cost of obtaining a degree, at ALL levels of
IQ. In other words, if you like technical occupations, do whatever it takes to
be classified as an engineer rather than as a technician, and in many
workplaces that means get a college degree.

But at the societal level of analysis, it is much less clear that increasing
the societal percentage of college graduates is really beneficial. The example
of different national development strategies during the 1960s and 1970s helps
clarify what might be involved. Some newly independent former colonies,
especially in Africa, pursued strategies of promoting higher education with
publicly subsidized college for elite students, so that the most capable
learners would no longer have to study abroad to gain degrees. Other countries
with a similar degree of wealth (the year my wife was born, Taiwan was poorer
than Zambia) pursued a strategy of broad access to well delivered primary, and
then secondary, education, with higher education paid for in larger part by
family resources of families willing to pursue higher education. The broad-
based national education policy of making the masses better educated promoted
much more economic growth (and political democratization and liberalization)
than the focus-on-elites policy of directly increasing the number of college
graduates.

There is formal research on how much students learn during college attendance,

[http://www.todroberts.com/USF/PerfectStorm_UndergradEducatio...](http://www.todroberts.com/USF/PerfectStorm_UndergradEducation.pdf)

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much)

and the unsurprising finding of that research is that some students learn
quite a bit during their college years, but some hardly learn anything at all.
College-as-such, without regard to what major the student pursues, and what
the academic atmosphere of the college is, doesn't necessarily lead to
intellectual growth for the enrolled students.

P.S. Noting an early downvote to this comment, I'm wondering what people who
disagree with these observations of the real world have to say to provide
evidence for their disagreement. I learned during my high school education,
and continued to learn during my college education, to ask for citations of
facts as I form my opinions about public policy.

