This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 15th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Does Higher Education Funding drive economic performance.

If it doesn't, then billions of dollars

may have been wasted in a futile effort to drive growth

by educating more people.

George Leaf is Vice President for research

at the John William Pulp Center for Higher Education Policy.

He believes that the bloom is off the rows for the generic bachelor's degree, but still he agrees the legend persists in many states and in the halls of power

and government spending on higher ed drives robust economic performance.

Yes, I hear the same thing often, and I think it's a mistake to assume that you can drive economic

growth simply by putting more and more young people through college.

If young people are good students and ambitious, they don't go to college on their own.

And nearly all of them who have high drive and high ability

already are in college.

Trying to expand college is almost certainly

going to mean we'll drag in more of the multitudes who are fairly disinterested students,

disengage from academics, and simply slapping college credentials on those kinds of students is not going to

accomplish anything except to expand your higher ed sector. And it hasn't the

education system in the United States through you know getting rid of a lot of racial barriers and things like that

and better testing methods actually gotten better at getting the right people to the right

schools in terms of increasing efficiencies there?

Well that may very well be true but I think our system on the whole is characterized by

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