AN EXPENSIVE AND INEFFECTIVE SIGNAL?  For a job market signal to accurately identify a person as having the proper ability for the job, it must be sufficiently costly and difficult to acquire that people lacking the ability will not pursue it.  A conversation about universal college includes an essay by Atlantic editor David Indiviglio that suggests the push to increase college enrollment actually produces a pooling equilibrium in which the signal loses its value.

You don't want to hire someone to whom you have to explain something three times before he or she gets it. Or worse, you don't want to hire someone who will never be able to grasp that thing, due to inferior reasoning ability. As a result, a college degree has become a proxy for determining whether a job applicant has a minimum level of intelligence necessary to perform a job. But with many private college educations exceeding $120,000 these days, that's a pretty expensive means for identifying adequate intelligence.

Unfortunately, this may describe all a college degree has become. There was a time when a high school degree served this purpose. But when high school standards declined and college became more popular, some applicants stood out above others as being more educated and potentially smarter than those with only a high school diploma. If the trend keeps up, however, a time will come when a college degree isn't enough either: masters degrees will be commonly sought, as the value of college degrees fall to be worth as little high school degrees are today, since so many applicants will have them. If this trend keeps up forever, perhaps we'll one day have locksmiths with PhD's.

At some point, we have to ask when the madness will stop. As college gets deemed more and more essential, it also gets more and more expensive. At this time, it still appears to a sensible investment, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily worthwhile in the broader sense. If the same person could be performing the same job without that degree, then it was a waste of tens of thousands of dollars, or in some cases even over a hundred thousand dollars. And that doesn't even consider the four years wasted, when a person could be developing on-the-job skills, instead of absorbing academic knowledge that he or she will never use.

Note/Update: A few readers have suggested that the situation would be better if employers didn't face potential lawsuits for conducting aptitude tests. Without that option, they instead must rely on college as a gauge of ability. Conducting aptitude tests would certainly be better than forcing people to waste the time and money of college if it's unnecessary. 

In the limit the increased time to acquire an accurate signal collides with the decreased time to realize a return on the investment. There's probably a model to that effect in one of the economics journals. (Note to self: maybe yet another research project to start and struggle to finish.)

A recent New York Times column by David Leonhardt approaches the problem from a different direction.

Either way, the general skills that colleges teach, like discipline and persistence, may be more important than academics anyway.

None of this means colleges are perfect. Many have abysmal graduation rates. Yet the answer is to improve colleges, not abandon them. Given how much the economy changes, why would a high-school diploma forever satisfy most citizens’ educational needs?

Perhaps in the precincts where writers for the house organ of the Eastern Establishment gather, where your excellent high school comes bundled with a granite countertop, High School is still High School, and College is College.   But maybe not.

My elitism comes from the few years I spent as an adjunct at George Mason. The typical undergrad in my course could not write a paper or solve an algebra problem. I doubt that adding more students at this margin is the way to raise people's incomes.

Or, framed in the form of an hypothesis,

Regarding the third point, one thing I’ve said before is that rather than scraping closer to the bottom of the college-eligibility barrel — when the average student has a 40 percent chance of not finishing, what chance does the marginal student have? — we should encourage kids in useless majors to switch to something employers actually value.

Or insist that the high schools do their job, in order that the colleges can do theirs. Or change the campus culture such that the placebound strivers who might, but for the admission decisions of the 200 contenders for the top 50 universities, be offered the same intellectual challenges that those contenders might offer, rather than be fobbed off with programming structured by access-assessment-remediation-retention.