The College Fix

Professor Krugman, whose typical criticism of government spending packages is that they aren’t massive enough, makes a striking concession in his latest NYT column on higher ed spending:

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. …

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Krugman points out that technological advances seem to be displacing educated workers–information analyzers, for instance–more rapidly than heavy laborers. (He even gives Watson the Jeopardy-winning Robot a much-deserved shout out). College graduates may actually have a disadvantage in the job market of the future, because computers can perform some of their duties.

I would point out that this isn’t a bad thing. If computers can do certain jobs more cheaply and efficiently than humans, the businesses employing them will be able to offer cheaper goods and services to consumers, invest and grow their companies, etc. While some people lose out–skilled workers, in this case–society as a whole is better off.

Moreover, if a college degree isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, the market should reflect this by sending fewer people to college. Or at least it would, if government forces weren’t distorting the true costs and benefits of attending college by burying them under piles of public money. President Obama would do well to learn this lesson, having used his most recent state of the union address to demand that  “by the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” (Tell that to America’s 300,000 bartenders who paid for college degrees they didn’t need).

While I’m happy that Krugman is finally admitting in part this obvious truth, it’s a little late coming. Here is Krugman a year and a half ago, demanding a higher ed stimulus package:

We don’t have to call it a stimulus, but it would be a very effective way to create or save thousands of jobs. And it would, at the same time, be an investment in our future.Beyond that, we need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation’s historic success is now a wasting asset. Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.

So much for that.

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