> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

I think the imbalance is actually in the other direction, if you ask it that way: the fraction of the population with college degrees is considerably lower than the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees. Unemployment among people who don't have college degrees is very high, suggesting that there aren't enough no-degree-required jobs. And when no-degree-required jobs do come on the market, they get massively over-applied for, like when McDonald's announced 50,000 job openings and received a million applicants.

Now whether those jobs should require college degrees is another story. For better or worse, employers demand degrees for a wide range of jobs, and you often won't even get past an automated HR screen if you don't have one. Until employers start offering more jobs to people without degrees, people will continue to feel that they need one, so they can qualify for those openings.

Well, are you assuming that no one applying for the McDonald's job has a degree? I think the situation has probably gotten to the point that there are so many "useless" degrees on the market, that it no longer even makes sense to talk about "fraction with degrees". So, let's try rewording it:

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with a particular type of college degree matches the fraction of available jobs requiring that type of college degree?

As an interesting aside, one advantage of providing a free university education is that you only need to provide it for as many students as you need to attain a certain degree. Need more doctors? Then provide more free slots for premed students. Need fewer lawyers? Then this year there aren't as many prelaw slots available.

Such a system may seem rather sanguine, but it's also worth noting that the rest of the world does not seem to equate career success with a happy life in the same way the US does.

It's hard to reliably infer causation from the correlation, but from the statistics I can find, even holders of "useless" degrees have significantly lower unemployment rates and higher wages than people who hold no degree at all.

In fact from what I can find the employment/wage gap between degreed and non-degreed people is actually larger in non-STEM fields. You can get work as a no-degree-having programmer or statistics guru, but if you're not technical, having no degree is a much bigger problem. Among miscellaneous jobs that often advertise that you need a degree: store manager, social worker, high-school teacher, most white-collar clerical positions in large companies, etc.

Sometimes any degree will do. It's not like IBM hiring an office assistant with "B.A./B.S. strongly preferred" is deeply interested in the content of a university literature curriculum, but they use it as a generic screen for some minimum threshold of literacy and maybe diligence. Companies seem to have no way of doing that screening themselves, so they outsource the job to universities, hoping that universities screen out the worst candidates.

True, but this is wasteful signalling and should be discouraged.

The degree advantages you describe are merely a way of redistributing jobs from those without the signal to those with it. No value is created, and some is lost due to the cost of giving people useless educations. The world would be a better place if no one had these useless educations, since employers would no longer be able to discriminate against those lacking the signal.

I have a technical degree, but I tend to disagree. There is a good deal of pure signaling involved, but graduates of humanities programs on average can write and research better after they graduate then previously. Heck, most can read or write better than my CS-degree-having colleagues. I also think there's considerable value to society produced.

In any case, it's easy for companies to solve that problem, if they see an inefficiency. If IBM thinks people without degrees are an underutilized/undervalued labor pool, they'll start hiring them. And if the market stops demanding degrees, people will stop getting them. Until then, it looks like a demand-side problem to me.

I'm confused what you disagree on - do you disagree that signalling is wasteful, or that the skills gained (and later forgotten) in "any degree, we don't care which one" are economically valuable?

By the way, a great way to test whether education is human capital formation or signalling is to consider the consequences of failing and forgetting. If you flunked out of college, would you have the same economic outcome as if you passed and then forgot what you learned? If so, then college is human capital, otherwise it is wasteful signalling. (Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.)

If IBM thinks people without degrees are an underutilized/undervalued labor pool, they'll start hiring them.

Unfortunately, in big companies, this is tricky due to agency costs. The hiring agent has different incentives than the company as a whole - if he does something non-standard, he will receive disproportionate blame if it fails, while the company will gain most of the benefits if it succeeds. If he conforms to the standard procedure he can avoid such risks.

This is a fairly well known problem in the economics of large organizations.

FYI, I ignore degrees when I hire. But if I worked at IBM, I might not.

I think the mistake you're making is you assume it's the skills (gained and later forgotten) that the employers care about, but in reality the college degree is just a filter, not unlike an IQ test. Sure, it sucks that it takes four years and costs $100k, but hey it's not the employers that pay so what do they care. (That's why degrees are less important for engineers, since you can filter eng candidates by asking them a few coding questions.)

(Not that this makes the situation any less deplorable.)

It's very interesting to read your second paragraph and then follow it up by reading about Hungry Academy: http://hungryacademy.com/

Essentially, Living Social has done just this. They decided that the talent pool was thin, and the usual means of finding new hires weren't cutting it, so they mixed a bit of unconventional hiring with a dash of unconventional education and came up with the Hungry Academy. It will be interesting to see if this is a continuing trend, though I can't say I exactly relish the idea of corporate sponsored higher education as the new norm.

> available jobs that require college degrees

It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Why does a secretary position require a bachelor's degree? Especially when it's any bachelor's degree, regardless of major?

> It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Yes, the stack of resumes is smaller. However, I think the key here is that the employer believes the stack of resumes is likely to have a higher ratio of "good" candidates to "bad" candidates.

In economics this is called "signaling". The degree may not endow the person with any particular skill necessary to do the job, but it indicates ("signals") to the employer that the person has certain characteristics that allowed them to earn their degree.

In this case, they can show up on time, complete assignments in a timely manner and use a computer (along with some other things, I'm sure). These are (in theory) qualities that are required to earn a college degree. They are also required for almost all jobs, including fairly menial ones.

The idea is that you can create a pool that is richer in the desired characteristics by limiting it based on the signal.

So, let's pretend 50% of the general population and 75% of the college-graduate population can, say, complete assignments on time (just an example, no "lazy college student" anecdotes please). If you allow anyone to apply for a given job, 50% of the people in your hiring pool will be able to complete assignments on time. But if you limit the applicant pool to just the college graduates, you get to choose (semi-randomly in the case of job interviews) from a pool in which 50% more of the people (75%) can complete assignments on time. This means you are more likely, all else being equal, to end up with a person who can complete assignments on time.

Of course the usefulness of this sort of signal is dependent on whether the assumed characteristics are in fact required to earn a college degree, YMMV. But this is why employers require college degrees for jobs that don't seem like they should require one.

I know. My question was rhetorical, and mostly kvetching due to my fiance trying to find a job and being stymied by the fact that she doesn't have her degree yet.

The problem with those numbers is that we have no idea what % of the general population can complete an assignment in time, especially when you consider that as a hypothetical employer I don't care about the general population - I only care about the percentage of the population that's applying for my job. Again, this is all personal and highly biased, but if I had to pick a random person from my college classes and my fiance to complete some given office task, I'd give it to her, hands down. (But of course, not everyone is marrying her. Luckily for me!)

I agree that this sort of broad-strokes signalling is probably highly ineffective. However, given the difficulty of hiring, employers are likely to seize upon anything that can ease the process even slightly.

There have been interesting ideas in the tech sector, the StackOverflow jobs site for one. It would be interesting to see if anything can be done outside of tech to make hiring more effective.

Good luck to your fiance!

Because people with a 5th grade reading level can have a highschool degree.

Based on my experience, they can have a bachelor's degree, too.

Are all college educations equal? I suspect not. I attended a lower tier institution, and I'm pretty sure that someone graduating from MIT or Stanford probably had a more rigorous education than I did (if for no other reason than the quality of the peers was so much higher).

So I'd argue that we haven't watered down the collegiate experience, particularly on the high end. We've simply opened the doors to higher education on the lower end and made that attainable to a lot more students.

I can't imagine that more education for a greater number people is a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing. If I have to choose between a secretary with a degree and one without, give me the one who has the degree. I know that they probably have the capacity to learn quickly at the very least. That's what a bachelors degree really is in my view, a certification that you know how to learn more than anything else.