Forbes
One of America’s most durable myths is that the more people who graduate from college, the more the economy will grow. For many years, politicians and leaders of the higher education establishment (HEE) have advanced that notion. In his first major speech as president, for example, Barack Obama said that if we want a strong economy, we need to lead the world in the percentage of the population that has earned a college degree.
And in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Public Colleges Boost Economic Growth,” two college presidents (Robert Gates of William and Mary and David Boren of the University of Oklahoma) argued that decreasing state spending on higher education means that we are “sacrificing our young people’s futures—and our future economic growth….”
Those ideas sound appealing, but they are thoroughly mistaken. We cannot pull the economy up by the bootstraps through increased spending on higher education, even if that led to larger numbers of people with college degrees, which it won’t.
