Ramesh Ponnuru makes a case against higher education for all:

People with college degrees make a lot more than people without them, and that difference has been growing. But does that mean that we should help more kids go to college — or that we should make it easier for people who didn’t go to college to make a living?…

The benefits of putting more people in college are also oversold. Part of the college wage premium is an illusion. People who go to college are, on average, smarter than people who don’t. In an economy that increasingly rewards intelligence, you’d expect college grads to pull ahead of the pack even if their diplomas signified nothing but their smarts. …

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. … But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish. …

It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs.

I’ve written before about what I call the “cartel of the credentialed” — to teach kindergartners, because it requires accreditation, many people are spending 4-6 years obtaining degrees and masters in elementary education. (John Roberts, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spent just three years earning his bachelor’s at Harvard.)

In “Beyond The B.A.,” which appeared in the October 2009 issue of National Review, Robert Verbruggen writes:

To decide whether policy should encourage greater college enrollment, we must ask whether marginal students — those who enrolled mainly because it was expected of them — are succeeding, since this is the type of student most open to suasion. If they’re thriving, we should send more like them. If they’re having problems, scraping closer to the bottom of the college-eligibility barrel won’t help anyone. The evidence favors the latter scenario. …

It’s rarely mentioned that this country has an enormous dropout problem. Of students who enroll in four-year universities, about 40 percent fail to earn degrees within six years. …

[Additionally] about 25 percent of 21- to 29-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees were mal-employed, says Andrew Sum, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS). Another 15 percent were unemployed, meaning that only about 60 percent of college graduates in this age range were doing work that required college.

In other words, the current paradigm in which public policy officials are enmeshed is predicated on platitudinous promises like “a college graduate earns on average a million more in his lifetime than a non college grad”, without any of the relevant qualifying data.

When 40 percent drop out of college after having attended for a least a semester, and 40 percent of graduates end up either unemployed or under-employed during the first decade after graduating, the full scope of just how many are mis-investing in higher learning and foregoing earnings potential comes into focus.

One’s 20s are one’s prime earning years, when the miracle of compound interest is most important for long term wealth creation. And because higher education is promised as a right to so many, millions attend and invest either never to finish or to find themselves underemployed, while servicing a sometimes massive student debt load to boot.

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Related: In 1970, Roy Lucas chronicled the historical development of the notion of higher ed as a right rather than a privilege. An excerpt at JSTOR is here.

Also: Marty Nemko has written extensively on higher education and its lack of consumer disclosure and protections. A catalog of his articles is here, and two relevant articles are here and here.