A new bit of disinformation from the Higher Education Works Foundation features outgoing UNC system president Thomas W. Ross. Ross has read a Bloomberg article, he says, that claims, in his words, “We’re not going to have enough college graduates to fill the jobs in America.” (Here’s the article, from February.)
The logic, shared by those in the higher education establishment who want a top-down approach to increasing the number of college graduates in the U.S., is as follows. The college graduate unemployment rate is 2.8 percent, versus 5.7 percent for everyone else. Guys like Guy LeBas, a fixed income strategist quoted in the article, claim this means we could run out of “new, productive people to employ.”
Ross may be right that employers are running out of college graduates to hire (although that 2.8 percent number does not account for foreign workers), but it does not follow that the jobs won’t be filled. As the Bloomberg article correctly points out, this supposed shortage of new productive people will only mean higher wages for the positions to be filled.
And most importantly, it’s not Tom Ross’ job, nor Governor Pat McCrory’s job, nor President Barack Obama’s job, to produce more graduates. That idea is nothing more than crony capitalism–welfare for business. Let the businesses figure out who to hire, instead of scrambling to give them workers they insist they need.
