College For Everyone

David Adesnik asks an interesting question -- what if we did something good and liberal and made obtaining a college degree near-universal? By and large, I think this would be an excellent thing for many of the reasons David cites. This would have a dynamic effect on the sort of jobs that exist in America and allow a larger proportion of the population to have better jobs. Still, it's worth noting that there are certain sorts of non-tradable unskilled jobs that would have to get done anyway. You can't outsource janitors or construction workers or landscaping, etc. Now in the context of a workforce that was, on the whole, extremely well-educated and productive these jobs might just become higher paying. On the other hand, you might have a replay of the European situation where rising productivity (and a robust welfare state) made it hard to find people willing to do these jobs for the customary low wages, and instead of paying higher wages the governments chose to simply import unskilled labor.

That would be okay, too, from my perspective. It's often not realized, but allowing immigrants into the developed world to work for what are low waged by developed standards but high ones by developing world standards is one of the more effective ways to ameliorate global poverty. But if immigration to the US were to rise substantially in this way, there might be increasing pressure to do what Europe did and turn the immigrants into a helot class of "guest workers" rather than full-fledged citizens-to-be. That, in turn, could have many of the bad consequences we've seen from Europe's illiberal immigration regime.

The other thing to note about education, of course, is that while upgrading the workforce does excellent things to improve the economic outlook for future people it does almost nothing -- indeed, can in some ways be harmful -- to current adults. When Bush answersed outsourcing questions during the debates with reference to the need for better education, he was sketching an appropriate policy response for the long term, but being completely insensitive to the problems these dislocations cause for people who face economic distress right now. To some extent, there's less you can do for currently-existing people than for hypothetical future-people, but that's not an appropriate excuse for doing nothing.