"People with more education have higher earnings. Boosting college education is therefore seen by many—including me—as a way to lift people out of poverty, combat growing income inequality, and increase upward social mobility."<p>Consider instead:<p>People with yachts have higher earnings. Boosting yacht ownership is therefore seen by many—including me—as a way to lift people out of poverty, combat growing income inequality, and increase upward social mobility.<p>I'm genuinely curious as to why people think going to college causes a person to earn more money. Is it about the actual knowledge and skills you can acquire? Or is it more that, given how many well-paying jobs require a college degree, not having gone to college reduces your options for getting into a more lucrative career?<p>The idea that college itself makes you richer, as opposed to historically having been correlated with wealth, is hard to fathom.<p>I can see the argument for universal college education in terms of career mobility. But even then it seems like a somewhat problematic goal. College tends to be expensive, and as things are now, asking everyone to go to college is effectively a large tax on life. You're not paying for something rare and precious, you're paying just to get in the game.<p>People are always going to look for proxies for filtering people by ambition, talent, and world view. Encouraging these filters to be things that are more easily changeable seems good for social mobility - it's a lot easier for someone to, say, learn how to play golf than get a four year college degree.<p>Still, it seems like the ideal would be for almost no one to go to college, so it's not a big deal if you didn't. And going to college is something nice, but far from essential for the job. Make K-12 more intense, or make it go to 14th grade, if we're worried about quantity of learning material.<p>A lot of presumably smart people advocate for universal college education as a means to reduce poverty. To me that doesn't really make sense. I really am open to changing my mind on it though. I'd love to learn more about the argument in favor of it.