A new column from Megan McArdle at Bloomberg explores something you’d think would be obvious to most people.

Why Uncle Sam Can’t Guarantee College Grads a Job

Tressie McMillan Cottom has an idea:

“Probably the single best proposal for higher education isn’t a higher-education proposal at all. A federal job guarantee has moved from fringe economic proposal to mainstream consideration. A recent Rolling Stone article may be the general-awareness tipping point, but it isn’t a new idea. For years there has been a steady drumbeat for a wage guarantee that would raise the floor on poverty and economic insecurity. Although you won’t hear much about it from sanitized memorials, Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for a guaranteed living wage. A federal job guarantee would reconfigure the emotional and financial cost of going to college. When living-wage jobs are contracting, people are willing to pay a premium for any leg up in the job market. Choosing college out of desperation justifies rising tuitions and predatory for-profit colleges that market themselves as insurance against job insecurity.

Which all explains why a job guarantee, which is usually considered a labor policy, could also be an education policy. The majority of incoming college freshmen are going to college because they want a job — not just any job, but a good job. They are not alone. People weigh the emotional and financial cost of college against how badly they want a good job. Everyone deserves to choose college without desperation shaping their choices.

A floor beneath wages could give that freedom to more Americans. Economists Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton have gone further, arguing that a job guarantee, if carefully designed, could also reduce racial discrimination in the labor market. African-Americans and Hispanics at every level of educational attainment earn less than white workers. Essentially, a job guarantee would subsidize the competitive price for minority labor. It is difficult to imagine that doing anything but improving the educational returns for minority students.”