"This year’s college graduates are likely to make the global economy more productive because of their education, judging by the results of a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research."
Oh really? How so?
“Human capital, particularly attained through education, is crucial to economic progress,” Barro and Lee wrote today in a posting on the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s Vox Web site that summarized their findings."
Unless one conflates primary and secondary education with "higher" education, which would be ridiculous given the marginal utility of the latter, those findings lend no support to the writer's point.
The fact of the matter is that college graduates, at least in this country, have already had a lot of their productivity negated due to time spent in college learning non-productive information and by going into debt to spend said time in college.
Removing government-backed student loans for college and graduate school would lead to more production, not less. Marginal students will get jobs and produce rather than wasting their time. Further, the cost of education would go down due to the diminished demand, and the value of the degree would go back up.
I know some want higher ed to be a "right" (which cannot be the case by definition, but I digress), but doing such will only continue to flood this country with degrees and make them worthless. There's a reason that, during time spent in Russia, I met a PhD who had to sell hot dogs in a Metro station for a living.
"You got a degree? Great! Too bad there's no demand for it in the workplace!"
Now, who wants to hear that (again)?
