Number of the Day

48%: The percentage of the 41.7 million working college graduates in the US in 2010, according to a study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, who "held jobs that required less than a bachelor's degree. Thirty-seven percent held jobs that required no more than a high-school diploma."

That translates to more than 20 million working people who are underemployed, which is to say nothing of the millions of college graduates who are unemployed.

And, as I have previously observed: "The long-term unemployed have been encouraged for years to return to school, often taking on debt to do so. There are a lot of people who have invested borrowed money into education that is supposed to help them get a job, only to find themselves still jobless but deeper in debt." Or underemployed and deeper in debt.

The report's authors—Richard Vedder, Jonathan Robe, and Christopher Denhart—used employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate that the number of college graduates is growing at a rate disproportionate to the number of jobs requiring a college degree. They question whether America spends too much on higher education, and ask whether society can afford to subsidize higher education for graduates who end up in jobs they could have landed without going to college.

"Student-loan programs and federal assistance programs are based on some sort of implicit assumption that we're training people for the jobs of the future," Mr. Vedder, director of the center and a professor emeritus at Ohio University, said in an interview. "In reality, a lot of them are not."

Individual solutions to systemic problems don't work. There has to be robust job creation, including and especially investment in cutting-edge fields, to counter endemic under- and unemployment, not fairy tales about how education is a guaranteed path to employment and economic security.