Utopia, you are standing in it!

Charles Murray has been cooking with gas lately – on fire. One of his points is too many go to college. Murray points out that succeeded at college requires an IQ of at least 115 but 84% of the population don’t have this:

Historically, an IQ of 115 or higher was deemed to make someone “prime college material.”

That range comprises about 16 per cent of the population.

Since 28 per cent of all adults have BAs, the IQ required to get a degree these days is obviously a lot lower than 115.

Those on the margins of this IQ are getting poor advice to go to college. Murray argues that other occupational and educational choices would serve them better in light of their abilities and likelihood of succeeding at college. Moreover, Murray is keen on replacing college degrees with certification after shorter periods of study such as in the certified public accountants exam.

Murray believes a lot of students make poor investments by going on to College, in part, because many of them don’t complete their degrees:

…even though college has been dumbed down, it is still too intellectually demanding for a large majority of students, in an age when about 50 per cent of all high school graduates are heading to four-year colleges the next fall.

The result is lots of failure. Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995, only 58 per cent had gotten their BA five academic years later.

Murray does not want to abandon these teenagers:

Recognizing the fact that most young people do not have ability and/or the interest to succeed on the conventional academic track does not mean spending less effort on the education of some children than of others.

…Too few counsellors tell work-bound high-school students how much money crane operators or master stonemasons make (a lot).

Too few tell them about the well-paying technical specialties that are being produced by a changing job market.

Too few assess the non-academic abilities of work-bound students and direct them toward occupations in which they can reasonably expect to succeed.

Worst of all: As these students approach the age at which they can legally drop out of school, they are urged to take more courses in mathematics, literature, history and science so that they can pursue the college fantasy. Is it any wonder that so many of them drop out?

To add to that, he is in the Bryan Caplan School: education is often an elaborate former of signalling for many degrees. Murray says that college is a waste of time because:

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance.

Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

If the OECD is to be believed, that not enough people are going to college from lower middle class families, obviously IQ is not one of the constraints on access to college Charles Murray suggested it to be.

The growing strength of the case that education is a form of signalling is a literature that the now famous OECD paper reviewed, found wanting, but did not have time to discuss in the working paper.

Another contemporary theme the OECD paper reviewed, found wanting, but did not have time to discuss is a large number of graduates who end up holding jobs that do not require a university education – going to college:

About 48 per cent of employed U.S. college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests requires less than a four-year college education.

Eleven per cent of employed college graduates are in occupations requiring more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor’s, and 37 per cent are in occupations requiring no more than a high-school diploma.

The proportion of overeducated workers in occupations appears to have grown substantially; in 1970, fewer than one per cent of taxi drivers and two per cent of fire-fighters had college degrees, while now more than 15 per cent do in both jobs

All in all, the OECD has gone into the dragons den by backing the accumulation of human capital as its mechanism to link inequality with lower growth. No matter how you spin it, this linking of lower economic growth to greater inequality through financial constraints on the accumulation of human capital by the lower middle class was a bold hypothesis.

The case for investing more in education is not a slam dunk. Higher education – university or polytechnic – is a rat race that many don’t need to join.The case for the government paying a great many more to join that rat race is rather weak.