Blogs:

There has been a constant urging to enhance access to college by both conservatives as well as by the liberals for many years now. They have been listing out the importance of college education and have pushed for billions of dollars of spending to enhance the flow of students. It is however time to consider if this is a good idea.

While many people are strong in their view that this is a gross misallocation of resources, skeptics feel that this is a higher education ‘scam’. According to news published in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Richard Vedder, the needs of the job market does not match the education offered to the young people.

This is based on an alarming statistic that shows that at least sixty percent of those who graduated between the years 1992 and 2008 presently work in low skilled jobs along with others who only have a high school diploma or not even that.

Based on this study, Vedder concludes that from a vocational and economic perspective, the push to enhance the number of college graduates is highly misguided. Emphasized by many including President Obama, this is a completely wrong notion and employers just use the piece of paper proclaiming a degree or diploma as a means of screening prospective employees.

According to Ed Whelan, Ethics and Public Policy Center President, even for jobs that do not require college level skills, employers insist on degrees. He feels that instead of wasting their time and money chasing a college education for a diploma, young people will just be happier working in a productive field.

Young women and men who attend mediocre high schools that do not prepare them for college education waste years and ultimately fail to get decent jobs. The only winner in this scenario is the colleges and universities who are in great demand and make maximum use of it.

According to him, this is more a legal issue than an economic problem. According to Whelan, racial quota severely limits employers from using any other system apart from the college degrees to select candidates. 

The flaw lies in permitting college diploma as a requirement that comes with a disparate racial impact. This requirement is less connected to job qualifications than to skill certificates that cannot be used anyway by employers.

He said that it is time for some hard thinking on this issue as otherwise we will soon find an entire cottage industry of lawyers mushrooming and suing big companies for making college education a pre-requisite for employment.

He suggests that there has to be efforts to demonstrate actual basic skill mastery through alternate certificates and encourage employers to take into account these certificates to make hiring decisions. He suggested offering subsidized tuition only for those colleges that have a control on their tuition increases and keeps them below the inflation rate.

He concluded that college education is for everyone is a myth that has to be busted and this is the ground on which education reformers must start working now.