Asymmetrical Information

Actually, if college is a signalling mechanism rather than training that enhances productivity, then pushing more people through college does damage. If college is a signalling mechanism, and you push more people through, you reduce the value of the signal it conveys. This makes it less useful for employers in making hiring decisions, and less valuable for graduates.

To answer this question all you have to do is look at the growth in employment by job classification over the last 20 years. The fastest growing segments are information technology, finance and health care -- all areas that require a high degree of education. Even within the manufacturing segment you will find this segmentation repeated.

If college were merely a signalling mechanism, then wouldn't we predict that people who dropped out of college would be making less than high school graduates? After all, the high school only group have not yet been filtered. As a whole they may be a fairly low quality group, but some would still graduate, which is better than the group that dropped out of college.

Some forms of education "teach you to think", but to be honest, what an undergraduate English major did was "teach me to regurgitate the political opinions of my professors in essays ostensibly about literature".

That's disturbing. I didn't think things were that bad.

I wasn't an English major, but I went to a liberal arts school and took a few English courses before deciding it wasn't for me. (I love literature, not theory.)

Biggest benefit? Not only learning how not to think, but learning why thinking in those ways was wrong.

I imagine that those on the margin pushed toward college often have one of two experiences: either they quickly fail out of school because they can't cut it, or they make it through four or more years of education surrounded by intelligent people with middle class values, a pretty valuable experience if it teaches you the habits necessary for life success.

Admittedly a $30,000 per year education perhaps isn't the most efficient way to teach marginal college attendees how to work on deadlines, systematically plan for the future, create social support networks, etc.

But I'll bet it works, and thus far we've hardly created an efficient alternative.

I majored in an engineering field. I think my college education had more than just signalling value. I suspect engineering degrees also result in a greater future earnings increase than liberal arts fields, on average (where perhaps the only real gain to the student is signalling value).

"teach me to regurgitate the political opinions of my professors in essays ostensibly about literature". That could be very useful as a journalist if your standards were lower. You could go to work for the NY Times, CBS news, etc., and regurgitate the political opinions of your editors while ostensibly reporting the news.

I vote for signalling mechanism, technical degrees excepted. Until I graduated, I might as well have never attended for all the good it did me with potential employers. Also, witness the ever increasing numbers of MBA's, especially those minted by online or previously "secretarial/trade" schools. There is no measureable skill being added, since skills are job specific and college is general, so the value must be in signalling.

It sounds like college != college in that some degrees do one thing while others do another. An engineering degree, in my experience, shows that the recipient has mastered a certain body of knowledge and has learned how to think like an engineer. In addition to my engineering degree, I have an economics degree. To get that, I had to master some concepts of economics and learn to think like an economist.

If some degrees teach certain skills and/or ways of thinking while other degrees don't really teach any useful skills or knowledge, then you can't talk about "college" as a single concept. For policy-making, if you are going to attempt to influence who goes to college, you need to pay attention to what they are studying or you may be wasting your time and money.

EI

Another functional attribute of the college experience is that it warehouses students for 4 years from the job market (not to mention increasing the overall consumption of alcoholic beverages, pizza and snack foods).

This keeps the true unemployment rate lower than it actually would be if all these students were actually looking for full time work. Whether or not on an economic level that's a good thing is questionable but it certainly has an effect.

Jane: Your English program and its regurgitation of Professor's personal preferences sounds like the saying: Before I received an English degree I could read, write and think. Now I can read and write.

I have to partially disagree about the value of "learning how to think" in a liberal arts setting. I think the case of being indoctrinated with various agenda-driven nonsense is pretty common in the "best" schools such as the Ivy League. My wife is a graduate of Columbia and can attest to this. However, there are many solid public universities that aren't the sexiest places for professors to go teach postmodern/deconstructionist/multicultural bullshit. I went to Auburn U. and while it may not have been the most academically challenging school, the professors did do a solid job of teaching those of us in liberal arts two things: how to think critically and how to communicate. My brother experienced the same thing. He did his undergraduate work in religion at Georgia State U. and his masters at Emory U. and felt that Emory taught him nothing compared to GSU.

I would also say that the gap between liberal arts graduates and engineering graduates narrows and even reverses for many after a few years working. I make more than most of my engineering friends do now, precisely because of those things I learned: thinking and communicating. For those in corporate America, you can attest that those are actually rare commodities in many companies.

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