Matt Yglesias on the ideal of universal college education:
Take any given poor kid, and you could give that kid a real boost in life by putting him through college. But he gets that boost precisely because a large number of people don’t go to college, so he winds up having a competitive advantage in the labor market. If everyone went to college, then the mere fact of having a bachelor’s degree wouldn’t count for anything. Instead, the advantage would either go to the people who got into the most selective colleges…or else you’d see advanced degrees become the "new college," separating the economic elite from the rest.
That would still be worth doing if you thought there was some reason that improving everyone’s educational credentials would lift living standards overall, but there’s little reason to think that.
This echoes a point I’ve made before - namely, that "Credentials are only worth what they can be cashed in for." Just as economists speak of the money illusion, I believe we should refer to the sociological fact of the credential illusion, whereby some people confuse the face value of educational credentials with their market value. Unfortunately, it seems that while such credential holders and the MCAS/standardized testing opponents who speak on their behalf are inclined to make the confusion, employers are far less likely to.
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