The Chronicle of Higher Education posed an interesting question with this article headlined "Are Too Many Students Going to College?"

The piece opens with the following paragraph: "With student debt rising and more of those enrolled failing to graduate in four years, there is a growing sentiment that college may not be the best option for all students. At the same time, President Obama has called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. Behind the rhetoric lies disagreement over a series of issues: which students are most likely to succeed in college; what kind of college they should attend; whether the individual or society benefits more from postsecondary education; and whether college is worth the high cost and likely long-term debt."

The Chronicle then asked a number of higher-education "experts" to weigh in on a series of questions. Following are some of those questions and the responses I found most interesting:

Who should and shouldn't go to college?

Charles Murray, a political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says: "It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation's youth possess. That doesn't mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people."

Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University, answers: "A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense. The number of new jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are academically overqualified."

How much does increasing college-going rates matter to our economy and society?

Bryan Caplan, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, says: "College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society. Encouraging talented people to spend many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output. If this were really an 'investment,' of course, it might be worth it. But I see little connection between the skills that students acquire in college and the skills they'll need later in life."

Marty Nemko, career counselor based in Oakland, Calif., says that "increasing college-going rates may actually hurt our economy. We now send 70 percent of high-school graduates to college, up from 40 percent in 1970. At the same time, employers are accelerating their offshoring, part-timing, and temping of as many white-collar jobs as possible. That results in ever more unemployed and underemployed B.A.'s. Meanwhile, there's a shortage of tradespeople to take the Obama infrastructure-rebuilding jobs. And you and I have a hard time getting a reliable plumber even if we're willing to pay $80 an hour-more than many professors make."

The reader comments which follow this article also are very interesting.

On the surface, it might seem almost ridiculous to suggest that too many people are attending college.

But, if nothing else, this article and the reader comments do a good job of getting one to think about this topic in different ways.

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