Until recently the “university wage premium”, where graduates earn more than others, was growing (see chart 2). More recently, though, it has shrunk, including in America, Britain and Canada. Using data on young Americans from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, we estimate that in 2015 the median college graduate earned 69% more than the median high-school graduate. By last year, the premium had shrunk to 50%.
Jobs are also less fulfilling. A large survey suggests that America’s “graduate satisfaction gap”—how much more likely graduates are to say they are “very satisfied” with their job than non-graduates—is now around three percentage points, down from a long-run advantage of seven.
Is it a bad thing if graduates lose their privileges? Ethically, not really. No group has a right to outperform the average. But practically, it might be. History shows that when brainy people—or people who think they are brainy—do worse than they think they ought to, bad things happen.
Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, argues that “elite overproduction” has been the proximate cause of all sorts of unrest over the centuries, with “counter-elites” leading the charge. Historians identify “the problem of an excess of educated men” as contributing to Europe’s revolutions of 1848, for instance. Luigi Mangione would be a member of the counter-elite. Mr Mangione, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, should be living a prosperous life. Instead, he is on trial for the alleged murder of the chief executive of a health insurer. More telling is the degree to which people sympathise with his alienation: Mr Mangione has received donations of well over $1m.
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A recent study, by Susan Carlson of Pittsburg State University and colleagues, suggests that many students today are functionally illiterate. A worrying number of English majors struggle to understand Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House”. Many are bamboozled by the opening line: “Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”
