Richard Vedder: heretic
Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, suggests that the United States might be overinvested in higher education. We might be spending billions of dollars as a society on activity of marginal value.
Arguably, one of the most important functions of higher education in America is signalling to employers that a given individual is intelligent, industrious, and otherwise employable. Many students learn few job-relevant skills in college, Vedder writes in Forbes. As an alternative to spending four years in college, he suggests giving students tests certifying to skills and competencies demanded by employers.
Government subsidies and private philanthropy have prevented a healthy disinvestment in higher education from occurring,” he says. “Few colleges ever fail. … America could use the failure of at least 500 colleges over the next decade to assist in needed resource allocation.”
“If we were to spend, say, one-third less than we do on colleges,” Vedder writes, “we would lose relatively little output from declining labor productivity, and if those savings were invested in other productive ways, we likely on balance would be materially ahead of where we are today.”
(Hat tip: Dwayne Lunsford.)
Bacon’s bottom line: If Americans want to enjoy college as a luxury good — going to frat parties, cheering at football games, participating in late-night dormitory bull sessions, taking classes on obscure topics that will do them absolutely no good in the real world — and if parents want to pay for that activity, well, it’s a free country. People can do what they like.
But should public policy be blindly subsidizing millions of Americans to partake of the residential campus experience? What is the justification for state and federal government subsidies for higher education, if not to prepare Americans to participate in the workplace? There is a compelling public interest creating economic opportunity for all. There is no compelling public interest in immersing students in 18th-century English novels or the tenets of Tibetan religion.
