This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 10, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Bachelor's degree is held up as a right of passage, a demonstration of worth for the marketplace.

So why don't most bachelor's degrees truly show the skills the marketplace demands?

Charles Murray, author of the new book Real Education, believes the BA as a singular goal in education

has outlived its usefulness if it ever had any. We spoke following a forum for

his book on Wednesday.

What's wrong with the BA?

What's the matter with it?

Well, except for the fact that it's meaningless and it costs a lot of money and waste people's time and stigmatizes everybody who

doesn't get one. Aside from that, it's just fine. All the things I just said are

really true. If you just, if these days if you don't have a BA you are in some sense a second class citizen socially

and and that's especially crazy because the BA no longer really has any meaning unless it's in a few fields like engineering or the sciences.

Germany has a more clear cleavage between a standard college education and more vocational education.

But as you just pointed out, there's this stigma associated with not getting the traditional

standard degree and going into this vocational education, even though the people who have that type of education often have a high level of technical skill and often make a great deal of money doing what they're doing. How do we get rid of that

that stigma? Well for one thing you suppose you could get rid of the

VA. I'm not saying that's easy, but suppose you did have certifications.

What that would do in effect is treat all of post-secondary education as vocational education.

And I think that's appropriate.

If you think about it in any career, all of us go through the same progression, whether

we are carpenters or history professors.

...