单选题 The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college. Along with skepticism, though, economic downturns also create one big countervailing force that pushes people toward college: many of them have nothing better to do. They have lost their jobs, or they find no jobs waiting for them after high school. In economic terms, the opportunity cost of going to school has been reduced. Over the course of the 1930s, the percentage of 17-year-old who graduated from high school jumped to 50 percent, from less than 30 percent. Boys—many of whom would have been working in better times—made up the bulk of the influx. In our Great Recession, students have surged into community colleges.
So who is right—these students or the skeptics? It isn"t too much of an exaggeration to say that the field of labor economics has spent the past 30 years trying to come up with an answer. In one paper after another, economists have tried to identify the portion of a person"s success for which schooling can fairly claim credit. One well-known study, co-researched by Alan Krueger, a Princeton professor now serving as the Treasury Department"s chief economist, offered some support for the skeptics. It tracked top high-school students through their 30s and found that their alma maters had little impact on their earnings. Students who got into both, say, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State made roughly the same amount of money, regardless of which they chose. Just as you might hope, the fine-grain status distinctions that preoccupy elite high-school seniors ( and more to the point, their parents ) seem to be overrated.
The rest of the evidence, however, has tended to point strongly in the other direction. Several studies have found a large earnings gap between more and less-educated identical twins. Another study compared young men who happened to live close to a college with young men who did not. The two groups were similar except for how easy it was for them to get to school, and the upshot was that the additional education attained by the first group lifted their earnings. "College can"t guarantee anybody a good life," says Michael McPherson, an economist who runs the Spencer Foundation in Chicago, which finances education research. "But it surely ups the odds substantially."