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The Bachelor of Arts degree

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The Winter 2013 issue of Cato's Letter (a publication of the Cato Institute) carries a meditation by Charles Murray on the value, or rather on the over-valuation, of the B.A. degree in the U.S. at the present. Indeed, he calls it a "bubble."

The word "bubble" is surely inexact. Bubbles in the economic sense involve commodities that are readily transferable. It is because they are transferable that they become over-valued in a very specific way. I can sell you my tulip bulb, or my dot-com company stock, or my mortgage derivatives' portfolio, simply because you are a greater fool than I am. You might buy them in the expectation that you can find someone even more foolish. Thus, we both make use of the ready transferability and the transaction is quickly concluded. This continues until the over-valued commodity is in the hands of the greatest available fool, after which point by definition it can not continue, and the bubble bursts.

I can't give you my B.A. in return for a payment in the same sense as I can give you a tulip, or a dotcom stock, or a mortgage derivative, in return for a payment. To that extent, then, Murray is making use of a dubious metaphor.

Still, he may have a point, and I will quote a bit of his essay here:

"The first [of various 'pernicious developments'] is that parents are not eager for their kids to get an education. They're eager for them to get the piece of paper, because it's the piece of paper that is increasingly required to get a job interview. As the BA began to take on this gateway function, the customer started asking for something that the school could provide independently of the quality of education. And what happened as a result? Schools had every incentive to produce as many graduates as possible but no incentive to improve their product. As such, any remnants of a classical liberal education have mostly disappeared from college campuses.

"What do you know as an employer if a candidate walks in with a BA? ...[For] the vast majority of undergraduate colleges and universities, you don't even know if that person can write a coherent sentence. You certainly know nothing about whether they've been taught to think rigorously. In short, you know nothing about the kinds of skills that they bring to the job -- skills that you could've assumed were there years before."

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