America May Have Too Many College Graduates

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.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...

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.