Going to college is a personal choice, not an economic necessity

The claim

College is a choice, not a mandate. The insistence that everyone needs a four-year degree has crowded out viable, respected alternatives — apprenticeships, vocational certificates, community college, direct workforce entry — and saddled a generation with unnecessary debt. Germany’s dual apprenticeship system produces highly skilled, well-compensated workers without a four-year credential. American elites have systematically devalued trades and manufacturing work. The appropriate response is not to subsidize more college attendance but to rebuild the pathways that make non-college routes economically viable. Those who chose the college path understood the costs; others should not bear them.

The mechanism

The claim proposes a mechanism of individual agency in a market of genuine alternatives: college is one product among several, workers choose based on their preferences and skills, and policy should not distort that choice through subsidies that favor one path. The strongest version adds a genuine structural observation — that the BA requirement has spread by employer fiat into occupations that do not functionally require it, crowding out non-degree workers not by their incapacity but by credential inflation that is itself a structural problem worth addressing.

This mechanism has partial validity that makes the claim genuinely contested rather than simply refuted.

Where the individual-choice frame holds: The BA wage premium is real and large. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data, compiled annually by the College Board, show the median BA holder earning approximately 65% more than the median high school graduate in 2022, up from 38% in 1979. This premium exists in almost every occupational category, controlling for age and experience. If a BA confers even a portion of this premium through genuine skill acquisition — not just credential sorting — then attending college is a rational investment and discouraging it is costly to the individuals who forgo it.

Where it breaks down: The 65% premium does not exist in a market of genuine, structurally equivalent alternatives. It reflects, in part, what Burning Glass Technologies (now Emsi Burning Glass) documented in the 2017 Harvard Business School report Dismissed by Degrees — that employers have raised the credential floor for middle-skill positions that have not changed in content. The study found that employers were requiring BAs for approximately 46% of job postings in roles that did not require a degree just five years earlier, and where existing workers in those roles lacked a degree. Burning Glass matched job postings against O*NET task descriptions and found that BA-required postings for roles like production supervisor, executive assistant, and insurance claims adjuster described the same tasks as non-BA postings for the same role. The credential requirement was not tracking skill content; it was tracking employer sorting behavior.

This is the structural pivot point. When the premium reflects genuine skill, it is an argument for college. When it reflects employer-imposed credential inflation applied to positions that do not require it, it is an argument that workers are trapped in a credentialing arms race they did not start and cannot individually exit.

The evidence

The BA wage premium: human capital or signaling?

The debate between human capital and signaling theories of education has substantial empirical literature that has not resolved cleanly. Human capital theory (Becker 1964; Card 1999) holds that education increases productivity, and the wage premium compensates that productivity. Signaling theory (Spence 1973; Arrow 1973) holds that education primarily screens workers for employers, conveying preexisting ability without necessarily adding skill. If signaling explains most of the premium, then a BA is a costly ticket to a show — the underlying capacity was always there, and the degree just signals it. This would imply that the premium partially reflects credential sorting rather than acquired skill.

The empirical evidence is genuinely mixed. Hungerford and Solon (1987) found a discontinuous jump in earnings at degree completion versus near-completion (the “sheepskin effect”), consistent with signaling. Oreopoulos (2006) used compulsory schooling laws as instruments and found large causal effects on earnings and health — consistent with human capital. Recent work using regression discontinuity designs around GPA and graduation thresholds finds effects in both directions depending on context. The honest assessment: both mechanisms operate; the mix varies by field and labor market. A nursing degree imparts genuinely scarce technical skill. A bachelor’s in business at a non-selective institution may function primarily as a filter.

Credential inflation as an employer-side structural phenomenon

The Dismissed by Degrees analysis is the most systematic evidence that BA requirements have spread beyond jobs that require BA-level skills. Key findings from the Burning Glass sample of approximately 26 million job postings:

• For non-supervisory production and operations roles, 67% of job postings required a BA in 2015, while only 16% of workers currently in those roles held one.
• In IT support roles, the gap was 65% (postings requiring BA) versus 19% (current workers holding BA).
• Across all middle-skill occupations studied, the average posting-to-workforce credential gap was roughly 3:1.

The report estimated that this credentialing behavior costs employers through narrowed candidate pools and higher compensation requirements, while providing little productivity benefit. The behavior was attributed to three employer-side forces: using the BA as a proxy when screening costs are high, reducing uncertainty in hiring with low information, and institutional isomorphism (copying what peer employers do). None of these reflect individual worker choices.

The German dual-system as structural, not just individual, alternative

The proponents of vocational alternatives often cite Germany as proof of concept, which is accurate as far as it goes. The German Berufsausbildung (dual apprenticeship system) combines employer-based training (three to four days per week in a firm) with vocational school (one to two days per week). Key features:

• ~325 recognized occupations with standardized national curricula co-designed by employer associations and unions
• ~1.3 million active trainees as of 2022 (Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, BIBB Datenreport 2023)
• Training costs borne primarily by employers (~€17,000/apprentice/year average employer cost), partially offset by trainee productivity
• Wages set by sectoral collective bargaining agreements, providing earnings floors that make completion attractive

What the US college-vs-trades argument consistently omits is that the German system functions because of co-investment from employers under sectoral bargaining agreements, state-level coordination by the Länder, and a national standards body. It is not the result of individuals choosing wisely from a market of equivalent alternatives — it is the result of a structured system in which employers bear training costs that US employers have systematically shifted to individuals. ATD data show US employer-provided training has fallen from approximately 32 hours per worker per year in 1996 to approximately 22 hours in 2020. German employers train; American employers screen.

Switzerland and Austria run functionally similar systems — approximately 60–70% of young people in Switzerland enter some form of vocational education or training (VET) — and achieve comparable or better productivity outcomes in manufacturing and skilled trades. The Netherlands has a hybrid system with a robust mbo (middelbaar beroepsonderwijs) track. These are not individual-choice success stories; they are institutional-design success stories.

Healthcare and the requirement creep evidence

The healthcare sector provides one of the cleaner natural experiments in credential inflation. Hospital systems in the early 2000s began systematically requiring BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing) for bedside nursing positions that had previously accepted associate degrees (ADN). The Institute of Medicine’s 2010 report The Future of Nursing recommended moving toward an 80% BSN workforce by 2020. As of 2022, approximately 65% of hospital nurses hold a BSN (National Nursing Workforce Survey, NCSBN). The clinical evidence for BSN superiority over ADN for patient outcomes is contested — Aiken et al. (2003, 2014) find positive associations between BSN nurse share and patient mortality, but the studies do not cleanly isolate BSN education from unmeasured hospital characteristics. The ADN-to-BSN transition shifted approximately two years of additional training cost onto nurses — cost now borne as student debt by predominantly female, often first-generation-college workers — in a field with demonstrated labor shortages that the credential requirement worsened.

Where the trades argument is right

Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce has documented, in multiple reports, that approximately 30 million jobs paying over $55,000/year do not require a BA — middle-skill jobs in construction, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and healthcare support. The center’s 2017 report Good Jobs That Pay Without a BA (Carnevale, Strohl, and Gulish) documented these pathways systematically. Their more recent 2022 report Still Searching found that while these jobs exist, access is stratified by race and geography — Black and Latino workers are underrepresented in the better-paying non-degree pathways. The existence of good non-degree jobs is real; the claim that individual choice is the main barrier to accessing them is not.

Who benefits

Employers benefit from credential inflation in ways that are often underappreciated. A larger credentialed labor supply — even for positions that don’t require it — pushes down wages relative to what a tighter, non-credentialed pool would command. When IBM, Apple, and Google announced in 2018–2022 that they were dropping BA requirements for many technical roles, they did so in a tight labor market where credential requirements were visibly shrinking their candidate pools. The announcement was partly PR and partly genuine, but the underlying logic — use credentials to sort when labor is abundant, drop them when labor is scarce — reveals that degree requirements track employer bargaining power, not job content.

Four-year universities benefit from the BA-or-nothing framing by capturing enrollment that associate degree programs or shorter vocational certificates would otherwise serve. The growth of bachelor’s degree programs in fields like healthcare management, criminal justice, and supply chain logistics at for-profit and regional institutions reflects tuition revenue capture, not genuine skill requirement increases in those occupations.

Republican and some conservative Democratic political actors use the college-vs-trades framing to oppose federal investment in higher education — particularly Pell Grant expansion, free community college proposals, and student debt relief — by framing them as elite subsidies. The rhetorical move obscures that the trades pathway has been defunded by the same budget priorities: federal funding for the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act declined in real terms from the 1980s through the 2010s, and employer apprenticeship infrastructure has not been rebuilt.

The counter

The strongest version of the individual-choice argument is not simply that college is optional — it is that the current policy apparatus actively subsidizes the BA at the expense of alternatives, and that this creates a credential ratchet that raises costs for everyone. This is a structural critique, not an individual-choice argument, and it is largely correct. Federal student loan programs make capital available for four-year degrees at scale; no comparable federal infrastructure exists for employer apprenticeships (the Registered Apprenticeship program is small), community college facilities, or industry-sector training funds of the German type.

The argument that trades are “undervalued” is empirically correct in the sense that the non-pecuniary stigma attached to manual and technical work in the US is not justified by skill requirements or social contribution. Electricians, HVAC technicians, and plumbers perform cognitively demanding work in skilled trades that are now experiencing labor shortages as aging workers retire and younger cohorts have been channeled toward colleges. The median annual wage for electricians was $61,590 in 2023 (BLS OES); for plumbers, $61,550. These exceed many BA-required occupations.

Where the claim falls short is in the mechanism: the undervaluation of trades is not primarily the result of government subsidizing college. It is the result of employer disinvestment in training, the weakening of union apprenticeship programs that historically funded and structured trades training, and the credential inflation that US employers applied to non-trades middle-skill positions. Rebuilding non-college pathways requires rebuilding the institutional infrastructure that made them work — employer co-investment, sectoral bargaining, national skill standards — not primarily reducing college subsidies.

References

Aiken, L. H., Clarke, S. P., Cheung, R. B., Sloane, D. M., & Silber, J. H. (2003). Educational levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. JAMA, 290(12), 1617–1623. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.290.12.1617

Arrow, K. J. (1973). Higher education as a filter. Journal of Public Economics, 2(3), 193–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2727(73)90013-3

Burning Glass Technologies & Harvard Business School. (2017). Dismissed by degrees: How degree inflation is undermining U.S. competitiveness and hurting America’s middle class (Fuller, J. B., Raman, M., et al.). Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work Project.

Carnevale, A. P., Strohl, J., & Gulish, A. (2017). Good jobs that pay without a BA: A state-by-state analysis. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/good-jobs/

Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB). (2023). Datenreport zum Berufsbildungsbericht 2023. Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung. https://www.bibb.de/datenreport/de/2023/

Hungerford, T., & Solon, G. (1987). Sheepskin effects in the returns to education. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 69(1), 175–177. https://doi.org/10.2307/1937919

Institute of Medicine. (2010). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12956

Oreopoulos, P. (2006). Estimating average and local average treatment effects of education when compulsory schooling laws really matter. American Economic Review, 96(1), 152–175. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806776157641

Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). Occupational employment and wage statistics, May 2023 [Data file]. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm