The Great Education Bubble

Christopher Roach at Taki's Magazine reports:

As young college students working as secretaries, paralegals, and restaurant managers see the kids from shop class, military technical skills programs, and other “blue collar” fields buying nicer homes, nicer cars, taking more vacations and generally doing well, word will trickle down to the buyers and their parents. This is the essential thesis of the best-selling book: The Millionaire Next Door. Instead of repeating hoary and well-meaning advice about education, it’s becoming clear that the most secure jobs will remain those that must be done locally. Everything that involves a mobile product—from programming to engineering and other fields that require college education—have been pummeled by outsourcing and will remain less appealing. If it happened to telephone engineers in the late 1990s, why not accountants and marketers tomorrow?

The declining economic fortunes of college graduates, coupled with tales of white collar drudgery, suggests that necessary and high skill blue collar jobs—plumbing, car repair, cable installation—will become more appealing and more renumeritive. Graduates of high school and community college vocational programs, far from dooming these students to second class status, are starting to have the last laugh as marginal college graduates (and drop outs) enter default status on their student loans. As the information of inflated degrees expands, businesses will likely drop college degree requirements to obtain quality employees, instead giving high marks in “two year” training programs more respect than four years of partying at State U. Not available when Fussell wrote his work Class, the U.S. News college rankings have done much to demonstrate to the general public how little a degree from a third or fourth tier institution is worth.

A certain percentage of students belong in college, benefit from it, and have higher wages afterwards. Their ultimate life successes stem from the qualities that got them into a top school: brains, a work ethic, comfort with complexity, and creativity. An education for these kinds of skills and abilities is not for everybody. And this is not a tragedy. In America, folks of average intelligent are neither handicapped nor destined to a life of unproductivity. An advanced economy like the United States’ provides many opportunities for nearly everyone to do well, engaged in everything from service occupations, repairing complicated devices, people-centered occupations, and the like. But most of these occupations do not justify or require a four year degree. The reasonable (though modest) incomes of these positions make a $75-150K student loan burden a very real one.

You'll want to read this one.The law of diminishing returns applies to college tuition.