More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity - Forbes
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George Leef, Contributor
I write on the damage big government does, especially to education.
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F O R B ES | 1/06/2014 @ 8:00AM | 12,193 views
More College Does Not Beget
More Economic Prosperity
This story appears in the January 20, 2014 issue of Forbes. 52 comments, 28 calledout
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In his first address to Congress President Obama argued that the U.S. needs to put far more people through college so that our economy will remain competitive with those of other nations. He set forth a goal of again having
“the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
Failure to raise our educational attainment level, on the other hand, “is a prescription for economic decline.” Current Issue
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The President’s thinking is shared by many others.
Economic success, both individually and at the national level, tends to correlate with education.
People (and countries) with little education are mostly poor, while people (and countries) with very advanced education are mostly wealthy. Therefore, it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that partaking of more education will boost an individual’s income and that a country can increase prosperity by “investing” more in education.
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People who have high intelligence and ambition often earn college and advanced degrees. Sometimes that formal education is important in their later success, but many say that their education had very little to do with it.
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Resist that temptation, which is based on fallacious reasoning. True, education correlates with prosperity and economic growth, but one of the crucial lessons of logic is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. We must apply it here. People
George Leef
Contributor
Follow (20)
I am a law school graduate who went into teaching rather than legal practice and then began to see how badly government has mangled education at all levels. Since 1999, I have worked at the John W.
Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a think tank that takes a critical view of higher education.
Also, I do lots of freelance writing and book reviews
More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity - Forbes
Conversely, some extremely successful people dropped out of college or never attended at all. And as those ridiculous Occupy Wall Street protests taught us, huge numbers of college graduates are unemployed or employed only in jobs that don’t call for anything more than basic trainability.
for a number of freemarket organizations.
Conclusion: Having a college education is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for personal success. Many people prosper without college, and many who have B.A. degrees or higher nevertheless struggle in lowpaying jobs, often saddled with high student loan debts.
Small, New University Does Something Radical
Only Hires Professors Who Want To Teach And
Only Admits Students Who Want To Learn
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
GEOR GE L EEF ’S P OP UL AR P OST S
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What that means for nations is that it isn’t possible to generate economic progress just by “investing” in education. More
