Who should go to college?

A Tdj by Larry Willmore:

There is growing sentiment in the United States that college may not be worth its cost for everyone. At the same time, President Obama has called on every American to receive at least one year of post-secondary education or vocational training. The Chronicle Review asked 11 experts for short responses to a number of questions, beginning with "Who should and shouldn't go to college?"

The 11 experts include W. Norton Grubb, author of Honored but invisible: An inside look at teaching in community colleges (1999); Charles Murray, co-author of The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life (1994); and Alison Wolf, author of Does education matter? (2002).

My favourite response was that of George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, author of The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies (2007):

“There are two ways to read this question. One is: "Who gets a good financial and/or personal return from college?" My answer: people in the top 25 percent of academic ability who also have the work ethic to actually finish college. The other way to read this is: "For whom is college attendance socially beneficial?" My answer: no more than 5 percent of high-school graduates, because college is mostly what economists call a "signaling game". Most college courses teach few useful job skills; their main function is to signal to employers that students are smart, hard-working, and conformist. The upshot: Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn't encourage it.
…
College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society. Encouraging talented people to spend many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output. If this were really an "investment", of course, it might be worth it. But I see little connection between the skills that students acquire in college and the skills they'll need later in life.”

Bryan Caplan, in "Are Too Many Students Going to College?", The Chronicle Review (8 November 2009).

http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Too-Many-Students-Going-to/49039/

An interesting bit of trivia: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), author of Principles of Political Economy (1848), refused to study at Oxford or Cambridge, and went to work for the East India Company instead. He was home-schooled from an early age and never attended formal classes.

Thanks to Alex Tabarrok at MR for the link.

DOW: I mention that the Chronicle article given at the link above has many points of view on the question of who should go to college, who benefits, and who should pay the bill.

This article reflects increased attention to the benefits and costs associated with education at all levels and the fact that many decades of rising real expenditures per student have yielded nothing in the way of better educational outcomes.

I also mention that in an ageing society, such as the United States, the opportunity cost to society of having young people in school rather than the workplace rises. Every person working helps lower the dependency ratio and the burden on the working age population in supporting children and the retired population. Social pressures for the young to enter the labor force and for the elderly to working longer or re-entering the labor force are likely to rise in the years ahead as the dependency ratio rises. These trends will impact on the education industry at all levels and over the longer term result in its relative downsizing in relation to the rest of the economy.