Thread by @Noahpinion

1/So, I'm generally a proponent of the "more people should go to college" viewpoint, but this article is giving me pause.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

2/It looks like the college employment premium, which had been a fact of economic life for many years, has now disappeared.

3/In terms of wages, the college premium still exists, but lots of graduates don't benefit.

The less successful half of the college graduate workforce is starting to look kind of like their non-college counterparts.

4/And while I'd hope that the rising number of graduates working low-wage jobs is just an increase in young people taking some time off to "find themselves", something tells me that's mostly not what's going on here.

5/And of course these are just the shrinking BENEFITS of college (for some people). This doesn't even take the rising cost into account.

6/The people who want universal free college have good intentions. They want to expand access to the middle class. But if the college wage/employment advantage only works for some graduates, maybe a diploma is no longer a very reliable ticket to the middle class.

7/Of course, some people are going to call for a transformation of our economy such that the lower end of college graduates are given high-paying jobs too.

But then I ask: Why does such a transformation require college as the intermediary?

8/If a substantial chunk of kids aren't seeing economic benefits from going to college, why do we want to keep an economic system in place that requires them to get that piece of paper before they can get a good job? Why not just give them the good jobs directly?

9/Why make kids spend four years of the prime of their life at summer camp just for a certificate that allows them to get a good job?

You can argue for the cultural and social benefits of college. But is that, by itself, worth 4 years of every young person's life?

10/If we want to make college purely about personal enrichment, at least make it optional. Don't require it as a precondition for employability. And maybe give people alternative enrichment options, like subsidizing them to live and work overseas instead.

11/Anyway, before we make these big decisions, we need better data on why some people are benefitting from college and some are not.

But we should entertain the notion that our economy should give people good jobs without requiring them to go to college.

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