That’s the headline on a blog entry at Phi Beta Cons by George Leef, director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in North Carolina. In his post, he directs our attention to an article about high-achieving students in England who choose jobs in manufacturing over university.

From “College Oversold, but Some Aren’t Buying“:

The Guardian published a fascinating piece on April 12 entitled “High-achieving students sailing through life without a degree.” The writer interviewed several excellent students who have gone straight into the workforce and are doing well without a college degree. Jamie Ponting, for example, at 19 decided against a university education (and 30,000 pounds of debt) to go to work full time for a firm where he had done a summer internship.

Another student, Katy Pascoe, went to work for a firm that builds yachts. Katy thinks she has excellent prospects with the firm if she successfully completes her internship, which for the first year included classroom learning. There’s a strong motivation!

The article also mentions a survey of university students showing that two-thirds do not believe they will find work relating to their degree, and a fourth saying that they think they’d have been better off with an apprenticeship or on-the-job training.

Would young people like those be any more productive if they had first spent years and lots of money to earn a college degree? I don’t think that case can be made.

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute argues that certification of accomplishments, knowledge and skills is a more rational educational approach than the four-year, B.A. default. From the Wall Street Journal, “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time“:

The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The essay in today’s Journal comes from Murray’s new book, due out next week, “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality” (Crown Forum).

(Hat tip: George Leef)