Underestimating Overqualification

But I presume employers will prefer a college grad, even if the job does not strictly require it. Such a person has demonstrated some intelligence and self discipline, which are valuable even for doormen. By getting the degree the borderline students give themselves a leg up.

According to an article I read in the Chicago Tribune in the 1990s, skycaps at the curb at O'Hare airport make six figures. They were at the time almost all sons of police officers, firemen, politicians, and other middle class people with some Chicago-style clout.

Maybe an ability to conduct better conversations, needed for a bellhop or a good taxi driver, or a bartender?

Does this data point support your claim that the marginal returns are in doubt? Surely it would be better to look the jobs that these boderline students do over the course of their life and compare that to their educational achievement?

In other words, are these people bellhops for life?

@Prakash:

Maybe an ability to conduct better conversations, needed for a bellhop or a good taxi driver, or a bartender?

What fraction of high school actually goes toward this skill?

I'm a high school dropout. So I'll go ahead and quit my job as a software engineer and get right on that bellhop thing...I didn't know it was what I was supposed to do.

It may take a while, though; I kinda of need the extra money to pay for grad school next year.

re: Frankcross

Not always. It is entirely possible to be "overqualified" for a job to the point where you will not be accepted.

Part of the reason for this comes in with the costs of training and acclimation. They may be lower for higher qualified individuals, but they are still non-zero.

If you have a highly qualified individual in a job that does not suit their qualifications the employer may rationally believe that that individual is likely to want to move on into a better position. After all, the highly qualified individual is working below their potential marginal revenue product by taking the lower paying job.

Because of this the employer will see higher costs of employment relative to someone who is less qualified. They expect to train the less qualified individual once and have them stick around longer.

Here's my suggestion: make subsidies to college education work-tested. No one gets them unless they work for a couple of years first and are able to make a down-payment based on their own earnings. That would be a good way to distinguish (a) those who can afford to pay for it out of pocket and don't need subsidies, (b) those who are really determined to get an education, and (c) those who might find out that life without school isn't so bad.

But this is just Kling's PSST again, isn't it? The mean returns are high; the marginal returns are not. And frankly, taken to it's consequence, the read is "well, the pallatives we've had for social injustice don't work any more". It's ammo
for Marxists.

But this is just Kling's PSST again, isn't it? The mean returns are high; the marginal returns are not. And frankly, taken to it's consequence, the read is "well, the pallatives we've had for social injustice don't work any more". It's ammo
for Marxists.

@Michael: I'm even more confused than you are... after dropping out of high school before I went into software engineering I pursued a PhD in Physics (String Theory) :(

@Michael and quadrupole:
I don't believe Bryan is saying you should not be a software engineer if you dropped out of high school. I believe he is saying that if someone has dropped out of high school it might not make sense to push them towards finishing high school or going to college. I don't believe he says that they should be pushed any direction. Just that maybe it doesn't make sense to spend all that time studying things which will not be used.

One assumption here is education is a means to some end. But education is also about the joy of figuring things out, reading, learning from your professors and fellow students, making friends, not worrying about a livelihood. As a species we have found a rather nice way to spend the first 20 or so years of life learning (and sadly this not available to many children) - and it seems to me a nice way to begin life.

Lets not forget people with higher degrees. After receiving my phd in high energy physics, I was unemployed for 4 months, followed by a six months stint as a bartender.

After that I landed (as most of us do) in a job in finance that in no way requires my phd. I spent 7 years + undergrad of my life training for jobs that mostly don't exist, and I'm not alone. Of the dozens of physics phds I know, only five have positions that actually require a phd. I get the impression its even worse in the humanities.