WHY IT MATTERS.

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds understands that substance trumps symbolism.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle class people.

But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class.

Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. One might as well try to promote basketball skills by distributing expensive sneakers.

Professional basketball players have expensive sneakers, but -- TV commercials notwithstanding -- it's not the shoes that make them good at dunking.

That's been a theme at Cold Spring Shops for a long time, and it's part of an investigation of a college bubble that Real Clear Markets (via Newmark's Door) describes unsparingly.

College participation rates will have to go back down to historical norms. Slots will have to be reserved for students that can actually profit from them, restoring graduation rates to where they were before colleges were flooded with people who don't belong there, including illiterate freeloaders. Selection will have to be based on merit, not social engineering. Loans will have to be restricted to majors that confer capacity to pay the loans back. Dead-end programs used to train the next generation of professors - whose only skill will be to teach more such dead-end programs - will have to be limited, funded not by taxpayers but by ideological philanthropists with a hankering for fineries like literary criticism and gender studies.

That statement about "participation rates" calls for further investigation.  Professor Reynolds motivates his column with an observation from the New York Times.

Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability.

That "higher percentage graduated from nonelite schools" is going to confuse the smug.  The reality is that, recessionary times notwithstanding, the hundred or so claimants to be the forty most elite schools do not produce enough human capital to fill the symbolic analyst jobs that exist, which means the land grants and mid-majors don't have to apologize for being more selective or more rigorous, as their best students can hold their own anywhere: in fact, having to achieve the hard way might be better preparation than having had it all done for you at St. Grottlesex and Robber Baron Memorial University.

Here, some observations from Andrew Gillen deserve further explication.  He's confirming a longstanding position of mine, that public policy no longer encourages strivers.

Working at the minimum wage, a typical student at a four-year college could pay their total cost of attendance in 1976-1977 by working 23 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

Thus, it was feasible to finance your education with a summer job and a little part-time work. By 2009-2010,however, a student would have had to work 58 hours a week. As a result, instead of attending college and working on the side, students are increasingly working full time and attending college part time.

Whether we're seeing a consequence of more generous student loan policies or a consequence legislatures breaking the old social contract is likely to engage policy analysts, if there is any support for such research, for a long time.  Further into Mr Gillen's piece is a suggestion that the fault is not entirely with the legislators.

As new college students, we completely bought into those orientation speeches about how dedicated faculty are going to mold us into tomorrow’s leaders. Within a year or two though, we’d had classes taught by TAs and adjuncts who are too busy to prepare for class or give us timely feedback, or tenured professors who are too lazy to update their lesson plans from before we were born (some of these are written on yellow paper -- not yellow legal pads, mind you, but paper that has yellowed from age). But the worst are the classes where the professor/adjunct/TA doesn’t even speak English. The first couple of times you encounter these issues, you assume that it is just some sort of fluke, soon to be fixed. But by the time you graduate, you have encountered these too often and have come to one of two conclusions: colleges are either nearly incompetent in making staffing decisions, or teaching is simply not a high priority for colleges.

Or, perhaps, the leisured professoriate meme is a misperception. Market tests are useful.  Wouldn't there be plenty of professors, adjuncts, and TAs speaking impeccable English if the jobs the professors held and the adjuncts and TAs aspired to were as cushy as a lot of this college-bubble talk suggests they were?