During this tough year for the American economy, President Obama repeatedly has declared “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.” While others have challenged the federal role in education and debated the issue of tuition vouchers versus public schools, there has been little controversy about the basic premise that more investment in education pays off for individuals and society.

Journalists and theorists cite earnings reports to support this proposition. For instance, a recent New York Times article by financial writer David Leonhardt was titled “Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off.” Leonhardt noted, “Returns from a degree have soared. Three decades ago, full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree made 40 percent more than those with only a high-school diploma. Last year, the gap reached 83 percent.”

The article also observed that blue collar and clerical workers make “...significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses.” But, the article doesn’t explain why postsecondary instruction leads to individual success.

Are people successful because they obtain higher education, or do they obtain the education because they are intelligent and motivated, so that they would do well in any event? Do employers award success based on arbitrary demands for credentials? Do applicants spend lots of time and money obtaining such credentials mostly to signal that their investments make their applications credible?

An individual wanting to perform work valuable to society as an accountant, mechanical engineer, or physical therapist, for instance, must obtain the requisite technical know-how. A substantial majority of college students, however, major in business administration, sociology, and other fields where the link between training and career is less clear. Surely, one might argue, four years of higher education give those graduates increased communications, analytic, and other hard-to-measure, but vital, skills. But that isn’t clear, either.

A rigorous new study that has received considerable attention is Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. It was organized and financed by mainstream foundations supportive of the current educational system. Arum and Roksa presented empirical data, drawn from many administrations of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an exam designed to measure learning in the liberal arts and critical thinking. Overall, these exams found that 45 percent of college students learn next to nothing in their first two years of college, and that 36 percent achieved little intellectual development after four years.

A recent book chapter by Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl began “In the postindustrial economy, educational attainment, especially postsecondary educational attainment, has replaced the industrial concept of class as the primary marker for social stratification. In particular, in the post–World War II era, access to postsecondary education has become the salient mechanism driving access to middle-class earnings and status.”

“Educational attainment,” in this context, does not refer to specific skills as much as to university credentials. A person obtaining a bachelor’s degree is presumed to have certain vaguely defined traits and skills, such as demonstrable ability to report for work, to follow basic instruction and complete tasks, and to get along reasonably well with customers, co-workers, and superiors. Prior to World War II, these traits were associated with a high school diploma.

For a company personnel department inundated with applications for management-trainee jobs, requiring a college diploma is an easy first cut. Academic credentialism and snobbery also contribute to the atrophy of secondary and postsecondary vocational education, which produces skilled blue-collar workforce in countries such as Germany.

For many corporations, it might seem that ranking applicants’ performance on a day or two of comprehensive testing on business knowledge, skills, and aptitude would produce a reasonable short list for interviews. But, as a practical matter, validating such a test under contemporary antidiscrimination laws would be impossible. Thus, the sensible alternative for businesses is to demand that applicants devote four expensive years to obtaining a college diploma. Since the purpose of the credential is to winnow down the number of viable applicants, a degree becomes what economists call a “positional good.”

While most goods, like home furnaces, provide value even if many other people have them, the value of positional goods depends precisely on other people not having them. That is why expensive designer gowns are in vogue, and why degrees from universities that reject most potential students are especially esteemed. If too many applicants have bachelor’s degrees, then master’s degrees will be required.

Government provides great subsidies to postsecondary education, in the form of low tuition community and state colleges and student grants and loans. To the extent that students acquire useful skills, these subsidies have some merit. This despite the unfairness that taxes imposed on moderate- and middle-income families are devoted to educate those who will substantially out-earn them.

However, to the extent that taxpayers’ funds further credential inflation, no one benefits. Like the spectators at a stadium, each of whom stands to get a better view, the subsidized degrees of some applicants are cancelled out by subsidized credentials of others.

Perhaps it is true, as Leonhardt wrote, that “Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among

others, make significantly more with a degree than without one.”

It would be nice if these higher salaries were a return on the value added by college educations. It would be an indictment of our system of sorting job applicants if the reward goes to those graduates, professionals and blue-collar workers alike, who have to devote four years and undertake great indebtedness primarily to out-credential their neighbors. Given the current financial straights of families and government, it would be wonderful if additional research would enable us to tell the difference.