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Mart Nemko argues it's the bachelor's degree:

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Of course, locking kids up in college does something very important: it reduces the labor supply. I remember reading in Road to Wigan Pier how the boys around 15 or 16 wanting to get into the mines. They thought staying in school was useless, boring and effeminate.

Posted by edelfenbein at October 25, 2008 11:03 AM