In response to McArdle's cover story on college, Dylan Matthews charts the college return on investment:
[E]ven today a college education more than triples your investment, an astounding rate of return compared to traditional investments such as stocks and bonds. Human capital is still very worth investing in. But unless growth in tuition costs is corralled, the return is going to keep falling. So McArdle’s piece was premature. The returns on college are enormous. But she does highlight a worrisome trend.
Elsewhere, McArdle responds at length to Felix Salmon's criticisms of her piece. It begins:
I definitely agree that college has become a necessary degree to advance in a lot of fields. And you can argue, as my former colleague Jordan Weissman does, that this represents a genuine advance: that the fact that 50% of insurance salesmen now have a college degree represents a genuine improvement in the quality of insurance salesmen.
But this is somewhat recursive: the fact that college diplomas are required for more and more of the high paying jobs will definitionally increase the returns to education, but if all we’re doing is using the credential as a signal, then this is not, from a social standpoint, a good thing. It would be far cheaper just to agree not to lean so hard on the signal.
The Dish 