But there is no linear or simple relationship between post-secondary education and economic advancement. Consider the characteristics of the following country:
Population: 11.2 million
Trading population within a three-hour flight: 500+ million
High school graduation rate: 94 percent
Number of universities and colleges: 47
Total student enrolment: 112,000
Number of medical graduates: 10,500 (half are international students)
By any global standard, this country is perfectly aligned for global competitiveness and leadership in the new economy. But the nation languishes, with a per-capita income that is only 10 percent of that of the United States,[12] 22 major deficiencies in infrastructure, high unemployment, and large-scale overseas employment of the country’s well-trained professionals. The country is Cuba, an ideologically frozen country caught in a half-century-long conflict with the United States that is only now warming. Mass advanced education has not saved Cuba from the dual burdens of ideology and politics. Much the same is true of Russia, a nation with a distinguished history of mathematical and scientific education and high participation rates—but with a cramped economy. Mass education is no guarantee of national economic success, especially when trumped by politics.
The outcomes of mass education are similar in many emerging economies as well. China has doubled its university and college system to about 2,400 institutions in the past ten years. In 2014, China graduated 7.26 million students from its universities, seven times the number of 1999.[13] Around 9 percent of Chinese have at least some college education, twice the percentage in 2000. In 2012–2013 there were a quarter of a million Chinese students studying at American universities.[14] At present, its university graduates are facing high rates of underemployment and unemployment, since there is a misalignment of the national economy and the education provided to Chinese youth. Put simply, the country does not have enough middle-management positions or even technology-based jobs for the young people streaming out of the universities. Remember those students going overseas to get an international degree? They are referred, upon returning to China, as haigui or sea turtles, and find that their degrees are not an assured ticket to career opportunities.
Chinese university graduates are not alone. South Korea has one of the highest university participation rates in the world (80 percent of high school graduates continue on to university). The country has some 3 million (as of 2014) inactive university graduates, because, policy-makers believe, of the oversupply of job-hungry young people. Steadily rising unemployment rates among university graduates have started to level off in Japan. But the country continues to wrestle with a massive oversupply of PhDs, many of them in the high-technology, computing, and engineering jobs that are supposed to be at the centre of the technologically-rich “new economy.” Singapore, with a robust economy, still saw graduate unemployment jump significantly, if only to 3.6 percent. Unlike other countries, however, the government responded by capping total university enrolment in Singapore at 25 percent of the high school graduating class.[15]
Nigeria, on the other hand, with about six hundred thousand university and college students in 2010 (down substantially from three years earlier),[16] has created a system wracked by corruption, mismanagement, and low quality. About a third of school-age children are not in school. The system is so dysfunctional that alert employers and universities in other parts of the world discount Nigerian grades and credentials substantially. The situation is similar in Egypt and other North African states that bit into the golden apple of post-secondary education. They have discovered that a functioning higher education system cannot be wished into existence in the absence of a strong national infrastructure, no matter how badly their citizens want to attend university, and that in any case the regional economy cannot accommodate most of the system’s graduates.
So, for every Israel and Finland, both advanced countries that prospered through education-driven growth, or Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, which built twenty-first-century economies off advanced education and training, there are others like Greece, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Zambia, Spain, South Africa, Nigeria, and Mexico that have not yet seen the growth expected from unleashing a flood of university graduates into the economy. In Portugal, the graduates from a large and academically solid university system cannot find work in the moribund national economy. Instead, they look to France, Germany, and Brazil for employment, as their working-class parents and grandparents did in earlier times. This has not stopped the expansion, however, because parents and young people alike still consider a college or university degree as the most promising—even if not assured—path to a comfortable life. The dream is international.
The Learning = Earning Equation
Why the enthusiasm for higher education? There are three basic reasons: first, sustained evidence that a university degree produces highly beneficial results, if not for everyone, then at least on average; second, major shifts in the industrial workforce; third, changing attitudes toward work in the contemporary world. We will discuss the first reason in detail later, but for now we note the following: there is substantial statistical evidence that students with degrees (especially if they have more than one degree) fare much better on average in the modern workforce than people who lack such degrees. Some reasons for this are obvious: doctors make more money than retail clerks and they require more than one degree in most countries; teachers generally have higher incomes than taxi drivers; and engineers enjoy better salaries than hairdressers. Those who went through universities and colleges in the 1950s and 1960s—when there were not many graduates and when the expanding economy desperately required hundreds of thousands of managers and easily trained white-collar workers—have generally been blessed with stable employment, decent incomes, and middle-class lives, at least in the leading industrial nations.
It is important to note, however, the qualification “on average.” The equation Learning = Earning is not universally true. Graduates in the fine arts do not make more money than unionized heavy-duty mechanics or workers in the oilfields, and many other similar comparisons could be made. Ask the 25 percent of retail workers or the 15 percent of taxi drivers in the United States who held college degrees in 2010.[17] The American Bureau of Labor Statistics gives a surprising estimate of the number of other “low-skill” jobs held by college graduates: 1 in 6 bartenders, 1 in 4 amusement park attendants, and 1 in 5 telemarketers all have at least one degree.
Some of this has carried forward into the 2010s. Graduates in fields in high demand continue to enjoy wage premiums and diverse opportunities for work, while the prospects for those pursuing general degrees and study in fields disconnected from the workforce (Film Studies, anyone?) have diminished in recent years. Nor are degrees from all colleges worth the same in the workforce. Contrast the contemporary career prospects of a Yale graduate in economics or finance or a Harvard graduate in law on the one hand, with those of someone with a Bachelor of Science in Biology from North Arizona University. Or those of an engineer from the National University of Singapore, a globally elite institution, with those of a Bachelor of History from University of Wisconsin-Parkside, a fine open-access college that makes a real effort to assist students from less-prosperous backgrounds. This part of the university equation has not filtered down to the consciousness of the general public, where the belief that a college or university degree—any degree—offers a major career boost remains illogically strong.
Some of the enthusiasm for college and university rests with the erosion of other opportunities. Imagine being a high school graduate in Flint, Michigan, or Oshawa, Ontario, in 1955. Automotive manufacturers had a huge hunger for hard-working young men—although not many women—at that time. A young man in Grade 10 or 11 faced a choice: accept a high-wage factory job with good union-inspired benefits or invest four years in a degree. Many opted for the former and, until the 1990s,