My Retrospective on the PBS College Debate

In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call is my retrospective on the debate I participated in last week. The question was the supposed need for the US to graduate more students from college in order to remain economically strong. As NAS readers know, I think it's ridiculous to believe that the productivity of our economy will be affected in the slightest if we were to lure some more students into college, devoting resources to (perhaps) teaching them things that will have little or no connection with the work they'll later do. Since we already have a glut of college graduates doing fairly low-skill jobs, the marginal benefit of adding some more must be vanishingly small. The debate was co-sponsored by the Lumina Foundation, which proclaims that its mission is to increase the rate of college graduation. I tip my hat to Lumina for putting its mission up for debate, but I believe that after listening to it, reasonable people have to doubt whether that mission is sensible. Before doing any more work premised on the alleged benefit of college, shouldn't the Foundation undertake a study to find out just how college studies actually affect students, especially those with mediocre to weak academic capabilities? Do they really gain in human capital so they can get better jobs and be more productive? Or is it the case that for many, college is just an expensive diversion?