Many recent studies and reports have lamented the relatively meager job market open to graduates, especially those outside of rapidly growing fields.
In an exhaustive research review of the return on investment of a college education, the University of Toronto's Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic find that not only college is as good an investment as ever, even as the supply of graduates has exploded.
The most convincing argument as to why that's happened? Technology. As computers and information technology get adopted, there are more jobs that require non-routine, abstract thinking — exactly what colleges hope to develop. In about 1980, the demand for college-related skills started to beat supply, and that's never stopped.
The following chart highlights that despite a massive increase in the supply of college graduates, the premium in wages for college graduates has continued to rise.
There's also a huge gap between those who finish college, and those that finish just a little, giving new life to the phrase "stay in school."
Even with the soaring supply of college graduates, McKinsey predicts an 18-million-person shortage of college-educated workers by 2020.
College isn't just about developing skills. It's also about either developing or signaling that someone has abstract and multi-level skills, and the ability to do or be trained to do something that can't easily be automated.
Unless you think that the march of technology has halted, or that a college education doesn't help boost what Oreopoulos and Petronijevic call "non-routine, abstract skills that require problem solving, multi-tasking, and creativity," then that premium, and the demand for college students isn't going anywhere.
Not everybody should go to college. People unlikely to complete it shouldn't go, and going into serious debt for a lower quality degree takes its own toll.
But research shows even students on the margin of going due to financial or academic constraints see a benefit. There hasn't been some drastic shift that's made a college degree worthless.
In weak or changing economies, those who haven't tailored their degrees to the job market are likely going to have a tough time right out of school. That's unfortunate, and a sign that schools have work to do in tailoring their offerings and reducing costs. But turning that into an argument against going at all is taking it too far.