Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time?
Can't write a letter, can't send a postcard
I can't write nothing at all

Yesterday, I was chatting with a coworker who used to be a teacher. I told him that I had finally watched all of Up the Down Staircase last weekend, and was struck at how old movies like that, and like To Sir With Love which portray teachers as heroic figures struggling against great odds have been replaced with a film, Waiting for Superman, that lays most of the failures in education on the teachers. But then I read this Daily Dish link to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University, looks at employment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and asks:

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 *parking lot attendants*. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I think a better question would be, "Why can't educated people find better jobs?" but Vedder takes it as a given that going to college was a fruitless pursuit for certain students.

I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning. As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.

All sorts of alarm bells went off in my head when I read the name of one of the authors of The Bell Curve. I remembered that the Bell Curve was very controversial once it became clear that the authors believed that intelligence was far more determined by genes and race than by upbringing. I just read that Murray is a libertarian pundit now associated with the American Enterprise Institute (Co-author and psychologist Richard Herrnstein died in 1994, just before the book was published.) I also just read that Andrew Sullivan, of the Daily Dish, published The Bell Curve in The New Republic without peer review.

Vedder goes on to cite another study, Estimating Marginal Returns to Education, and asks:

... at a time when resources are scarce, when American governments are running $1.3-trillion deficits, when we face huge unfunded liabilities associated with commitments made to our growing elderly population, should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic, much less vocational, success?

I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above. Increasingly, state governments are cutting back higher-education funding, thinking it is an activity that largely confers private benefits. The pleas of university leaders and governmental officials for more and more college attendance appear to be increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.

Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.

Now I have never believed that everyone should go to college right out of high school, or at all, and there is certainly a compelling concern against casually assuming too much college debt because of the way that debt follows you for the rest of your life, but when I read the shot across the bow above I remember the National Lampoon's parody - A Strong Back is a Terrible Thing to Waste.

There were many criticisms in the comments to the Vedder article, and among them, *mark_r_harris* wrote a more persuasive argument against too high a percentage of the workforce attending college:

On 60 Minutes a few weekends ago, it was mentioned that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would like 80% of American youth to attend and graduate from college. It is a nice thought in many ways. As a teacher and professor, intellectually I am all for it (if the university experience is a serious one, which these days, I don’t know). But students’ expectations in attending college are not just intellectual; they are careerist (probably far more so). As it happens, I am now living and teaching in a country, South Korea, that meets the Gates’ standards. Right now, about 75-80% of Korean high school students enter a university. The 20% of Korean youth who do not attend university are mainly poor rural youth. Given the Koreans’ diligence, it is not surprising that the vast majority of university attendees also graduate, many with majors in scientific and engineering disciplines (“soft” degrees like marketing are not as popular here). This is a dedicated country.

But you know what? They can’t find jobs. It was reported in the Korean media a few weeks ago that according to the latest government figures, only half of recent Korean university graduates have found full-time work. Even the country’s best university, Seoul National, only has a 70% placement rate.

Now, Korea is experiencing an economic downturn, but not as bad as America’s. This employment issue has more to do with levels of training and subsequent levels of expectation. When a Korean student emerges from 20 years of intense study with a university degree, he or she reasonably expects a “good” job — which is to say, a well-paying professional or managerial job with good forward prospects. But here’s the problem. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, a society in which 80% of the available jobs are professional, managerial, comfortable, and well-paid. No way. Korea has a number of other jobs, but some are low-paid service work, and many others — in factories, farming, fishing — are scorned as 3-D jobs (difficult, dirty, and dangerous). Educated Koreans don’t want them. So the country is importing labor in droves — from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, even Uzbekistan. In the countryside, rural Korean men are having such a difficult time finding prospective wives to share their agricultural lifestyle that fully 40% of rural marriages are to poor women from those other Asian countries, who are brought in by match-makers and marriage brokers.

Since young Koreans almost invariably live at home until marriage, whether they are working or not, it is routine for the young unemployed to do so. Their parents, who have a lot invested in their children’s successful outcomes, discourage them from taking low-level, part-time, or contract work, even just to get a start in life. As is usually the case, the only way they can see of improving their lot is not by lowering their expectations, but by improving their qualifications: by scoring well on English tests, getting additional certificates, and so on. But everyone else is doing this, too, so the competitive field remains the same. What will happen to these youths? The more years they don’t work, the less chance there is that they ever will. They become tainted, and possibly a permanently disenfranchised minority.

This country, in short, has, with the best of intentions, educated itself into a corner.

I presume he means South Korea. Harris' scenario fits with the many peak oil and economic collapse articles anticipating such a decline in the middle class that they advise that we should be teaching our children farming and joinery, not to mention bowing and scraping, but I can't dismiss the fear that they may be correct.