The latest edition of Education Pays, a publication in the College Board’s Trends series (of which Sandy Baum is the lead author) highlights, along with much else, the work of the talented MIT labor economist David Autor. Autor assembled the data year-by-year going back to 1970 to document the remarkable growth in the wage premium accruing to college-educated workers, which reached its all-time high last year. The key graph summarizing this trend is reprinted here from Education Pays.

Autor further shows that each additional year of schooling, even for those who attend but don’t finish college has a labor-market payoff, but with a bigger gain for the 20th year of schooling, which corresponds to college completion.

The bad news is that the growing gap between high-school and college wages has more to do with the declining earnings of high-school graduates than big gains for college...

The issues surrounding the effort to limit the amount of debt incurred by students who enroll in vocational programs that don’t lead to remunerative careers are more complicated and nuanced than most of the emotional public commentary might lead one to believe.

First, the question of the role of the Baum and Schwartz paper, How Much Debt is Too Much? Defining Benchmarks for  Manageable Student Debt (http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/pub/Debt_is_Too_Much_November_10.pdf). This paper traced the history of the long-time rule of thumb that students who had to pay more than 8% of their incomes for student loans might face difficulties and looked for better guidelines. It concluded that manageable payment-to-income ratios increase with incomes, but that no former student should have to pay more than 20% of their discretionary income for all student loans from all sources. The Income-Based...

TARP, the 2008 bank bailout, is an unlovely thing, defended by its supporters less on the merits than on the grounds that it prevented things from being much worse than they were. Ben Bernanke, for example, has been quoted as saying TARP helped prevent a second Great Depression. Those irate citizens who oppose the re-election of anyone who voted for the TARP bill must have a different idea from Bernanke’s about what would have happened if it hadn’t passed. But it’s hard to find any sort of account of just what alternative reality they envision.

Notice that the real debate here is not about what happened in the wake of the TARP bill—everybody agrees that the economy is still quite crummy—but about what would have happened without TARP. In other words, it is an argument about “what ifs”—or, as social scientists call them, “counterfactuals.” Of course, you never get to observe a...

Stories of individual adventures, tragedies, successes, and failures are compelling. The supermarket checkout line and cable TV channels are full of dramatic headlines inviting us to escape into the lives of others. It may not matter that the average American would almost certainly over-estimate the divorce rate in Hollywood or the profligacy of professional athletes. But when journalists and policy makers with responsibility for informing the public and designing policies to improve our society base their conclusions on anecdotes rather than evidence, the consequences are more serious.

It is difficult for journalists to capture the attention of typical readers without relying on human interest stories. The student who borrows $100,000 for an undergraduate degree, never finds a job, and ends up facing a lifetime of unmanageable debt; the student who quits his job, borrows a ...

This is a photograph of a distinctive roadsign welcoming entrants to the village of Snowmass, Colorado.

Every line on the sign is informative except that last one labeled “TOTAL."

On a related note, US News released its college rankings today...

College is:

A) a place where high-school graduates (typically young adults) move away from home to live and study for four years in pursuit of a bachelor's degree.

B) a place, usually in or near a city, where high-school graduates of various ages live at home and spend some or all of their time in pursuit of studies leading toward an associate's or bachelor's degree.

C) a place where people over the age of 18 can go to learn any skill or prepare for any trade.

D) all of the above.

Many people hearing the word college picture (A) in their minds, but only a minority of people who will tell you they are in college are doing anything like (A).

It's even stickier when learned commentators warn that some people just shouldn't go to college, meaning they shouldn’t do (A) and then urge instead that they should be doing some version of (C). But nearly everybody who is offering (C) is determined to...

The headline “Fewer Low-Income Students Going to College” has popped up on our screens more times than we can count recently. The origin is a headline on—and the opening sentence in—a Wall Street Journal blog describing a recent report from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Well, that headline is wrong. That’s not what has happened and that’s not what the report says has happened.

Why the confusion? The Advisory Committee reported that among those who had taken Algebra II, the proportion of low- and moderate-income students enrolling in four-year colleges immediately after high school was much lower in 2004 than in 1992. The percentages enrolling in two-year and other institutions were up, so the overall college enrollment rate was down only slightly. Census data reveal that the immediate enrollment rate for all high school graduates from the lowest-income...

The New York Times reported on July 2 that even in the current economy, many jobs are going begging. During the recession, “many employers moved towards greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad. Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.” According to the Times, employers say they are looking for aptitude as much as specific skills. “We are trying to find people with the right mindset and intelligence,” said one employer.

Dictionary.com tells us that education is development of the abilities of the mind (learning to know). Training is practical education (learning to do) or practice, usually under supervision, in some art, trade, or...

The story Wes Davis told on The New York Times Op-Ed page on June 16 makes sobering reading for those of us (we include ourselves) who advocate investment in higher education in significant measure because of the economic benefits it provides. Davis describes a program created by AT&T, back in the 1950s when it was “the” Bell telephone company, to provide a heavy dose of liberal education (complete with literature, architecture, music, and other humanistic subjects) to some of its most promising leaders, whose education was mainly technological. 

In inventing the program, Bell judged, as reported by the prominent sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, that these well-trained rising executives “knew how to answer questions,” while those who were liberally educated might better know “what questions were worth answering.” The ambitious program was, by those standards, a considerable success. By...