by
Robert Wenzel
Economic
Policy Journal

Recently
by Robert Wenzel: Homeland
Security Has Purchased 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks

College education
has become expensive and nearly useless. Got that? Price up, quality
down. No surprise, when government gets involved. Even WSJ seems
to get this (partially). In a
recent article, they write:

By some measures, nearly half of employed college graduates are
in jobs that don’t traditionally require a college degree.

Unfortunately,
WSJ seems to blame this on robots:

Ia paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research,
a team of Canadian economists argues that the U.S. faces a longer-term
problem. 

They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds
of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech
systems—everything from corporate intranets to manufacturing
robots—demand for such skills has fallen in recent years,
even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught
them.

If it was simply
a case of robots replacing workers in certain jobs, this would mean
that there would be productivity gains for the economy overall, beginning
and end of story. But, it is not as though we live in paradise where
goods and services are so plentiful that none of us has to work. Something
else is going on

The problem is
that a college education for the most part does not  increase
the value of a potential worker for an employer (aside from accounting
and engineering degrees). The college system is far from a free market
profit oriented system. Almost 100% of colleges take money from government
or accept students who receive government loans. This results
in colleges being required to meet government guidelines which have
dramatically dumb downed the system.

The Chinese government has created 60
million vacant apartments through its central planning policies,
while the U.S. government through its intervention in the education
system has created tens of millions of college graduates with vacant
minds.

College for most is really a waste of time, unless you want that accounting
or engineering degree, or you are really sharp, can get into an Ivy
League school and have a strong enough mind that you won’t be corrupted
by the system. In this latter category, I suspect no more than 1 in
500,000 could pull it off. Tom
Woods did it, but few others. I can think of many more that were
swallowed up by the system and now spend their time justifying some
intervention in the economy.

If you are interested in studying Austrian economics, just go to the
Mises Institute web site and
absorb that material. Studying under Professor Walter
Block at Loyola University New Orleans or Richard
Ebeling at Northwood University are outlier options, but that
is about it. For most who want to advance, they are much better off
reading James Altucher than
going to college.

Reprinted
with permission from Economic
Policy Journal.

March
27, 2013

         

©2013
Economic Policy Journal

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