One of my favorite, iconoclastic sites is Zero Hedge, which keeps posting material that’s damaging to all sorts of statist notions. One of those notions is that we can reduce inequality by putting more people through college and another is that you should go to college because it protects you against loss of employment and falling income. In this ZH post, Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised, we learn that many highly educated workers (well, at least people who hold advanced degrees) have experienced wage declines over the last seven years.
The writer, Charles Hugh-Smith, states, “wages are declining even in fields where advanced degrees are supposed to inoculate the highly educated from declines in earnings. This is not entirely surprising to anyone who has first-hand knowledge of the tremendous glut in workers with advanced degrees, but it does drive a stake in the heart of the argument that the solution to income inequality is more education.”
Precisely! The economy creates the jobs it creates, and destroys the jobs it destroys, without the slightest regard to anyone’s educational credentials, or the general level of “attainment.”
Hugh-Smith concludes, “As I often note, issuing diplomas doesn’t magically create new jobs in the real world.” No, it doesn’t, but the education establishment would like to have us believe that supply somehow creates its own demand here — that the more people we manage to push through college, the more “good jobs” the economy is catalyzed to create. We should have dropped that idea long ago. Pushing more and more people through college just gives us a bad case of credentialitis.