Robert VerBruggen is editor of RealClearPolicy, and he has crunched numbers in response to the ongoing debate whether a college degree is actually worth the investment.

The detailed analysis is in response to Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, who claims that college is a good investment and argues against critics like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder, who argue that too many people college-bound (hat-tip, Instapundit).

1. It’s not about college, it’s about college-for-all.

Matthews spends a considerable amount of time explaining that attending college is a good idea for the average student. This is true — but to the best of my knowledge, no college critic disputes it. For a lot of high-paying jobs, you simply need a college degree, no matter how smart you are; today’s doctors, teachers, engineers, and so forth …

2. How do you calculate a college wage premium?

As Matthews notes, it doesn’t really prove anything that college grads tend to make more than people who stop after high school. Getting a diploma requires a lot of intrinsic qualities — intelligence, diligence, etc. — and those qualities would benefit today’s college grads even if college didn’t exist. When we’re debating whether to send a certain group of students to school, we have to ask how those students in particular will fare with and without college, not how grads and non-grads fare in general…..

3. So, what policies might add marginal students in a productive manner?Naturally occurring experiments can give us a good way to evaluate policies, and Matthews cites a number of studies that take this approach. But while all of them point in the direction of “more education is good,” it’s hard to draw many conclusions more precise than that….

4. By the way, what do basic descriptive data say about college students?

Even if some students who could benefit from college aren’t going, we can’t conclude that all the students attending now belong there. A few simple statistics undergird most critiques of college-for-all, and they’re worth repeating here…..

5. If college is sometimes just “signaling,” what are the policy implications?

According to Matthews, arguments like the one I just made don’t “really negate the finding that college causes higher earnings. [They just present] a slightly cynical explanation of how it is that college causes that earnings bump.”

VerBruggen concludes: There are reasons to think that some people might benefit from more education than they’re getting now. But at the same time, there remain reasons to be highly skeptical of the push to dramatically expand college attendance.