“Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.”

– Charles Murray,
“What’s Wrong With Vocational School?”

In the second of a 3-part series, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute challenges the absurd level of demand for “higher education” in the United States, especially absurd when you consider the nature of a liberal arts education and the diversity of intellectual skills and interests:

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today’s college campuses — probably a majority of them — are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide.

As much as I agree with Murray’s identification and analysis of the problem (a problem I’m confident most people don’t even think is a problem), he does make one assertion I find puzzling:

Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

What’s he base that on? The university system is a cartel. When demand for a cartel’s products are higher than seem to make sense, it’s more than passing strange to blame the culture. It at least requires an argument. This assertion won’t do.

He does get the prognosis and prescription correct, I think:

The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. … Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. … Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don’t care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class….

Postscript

This is the first post on the new blog in the category I’ve decided to call schooling.

You can subscribe to it here:

bkmarcus.com/blog/category/schooling/feed/

Why am I not calling it “education”?

Well, for one thing, that word is practically owned by the cartel, and I’d rather be picked up by a Google search on “home schooling” than “higher education” ….

Another reason, though, is that schooling, as a word, describes an institution and a formal process — it’s a way to distinguish the contents from the container — a distinction that is not to the benefit of the statist “education” Establishment.

To quote Mark Twain,

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Finally, I’m as or more likely to write about the political economy of schooling in this category as I am to write about the particulars of teaching and learning.

PPS

Gary North’s presentation of the economics of the schooling cartel is cached here:

bkmarcus.com/cache/discountColleges/

And my collection of schooling/learning/teaching quotes is here:

bkmarcus.com/quotes/education/