The College Fix

White House policy adviser Melody Barnes follows up on the whole “winning the future” theme from President Obama’s SOTU speech in a Huffington Post article:

The future belongs to those who best educate their young people. And right now, America has fallen behind. We know that education is key to winning the future and that, in order to compete, we need to challenge ourselves to improve educational outcomes. The countries that best educate their children will be the ones that win in the global marketplace.

The reason for this generic, buzzword-laden piece? Apparently there’s a Building a Grad Nation Summit in D.C. this week. I’ve already written about why such a push for more college grads is foolishness (newsflash: there are already too many grads), but Melody makes a strange claim worthy of its own rebuttal:

Looking forward, over the next ten years half of all new jobs will require postsecondary education, and half of today’s thirty fastest growing job opportunities require at least a 4-year college degree. Make no mistake, those jobs will be filled — the question is whether they will be in the United States or elsewhere.

I’m not sure half the 30 fastest-growing jobs do require a four-year college degree. By my count, four-year degrees are absolutely mandatory in just 12 of them. A 13th is debatable.

But even assuming that “half” is accurate, this isn’t a very strong claim. I could just as easily say, “Well, half of today’s thirty fastest growing job opportunities do not require at least a 4-year college degree.” In other words, there are just as many fastest-growth jobs for college graduate as there are for non-graduates. If the American college graduation rate increased to 90 percent–the number Obama is aiming for–wouldn’t a huge number of those graduates have wasted their time and money, not to mention the taxpayers’ money?

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