how many is too many/few college educated people?

From Thomas Sowell in the C-J...

A perennial "good thing" is education. So it is not surprising that leaders of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities have come out with an assertion that "the U.S. should set a goal of college degrees for at least 55 percent of its young adults by 2025."

Nothing is easier in politics than setting some arbitrary goal — preferably based on numbers — and going after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions. That is how we got into the housing boom and bust, by mindlessly pursuing ever-higher statistics of home ownership. The same political game can be played by making ever higher miles per gallon the goal for automobiles...

Sometimes these open-ended political crusades can be given some semblance of rationality by referring to other countries that have bigger numbers in whatever is the goal du jour...

Given the composition of the population as it is — which is always what we have to start with — what evidence is there that too few or too many are going to college?

As someone who spent years teaching at colleges and universities for students who ranked in the country's top 10 percent, I nevertheless encountered many students whose interest in intellectual matters was less than overwhelming, to put it charitably....

Considering the enormous costs of maintaining a student in college — whether that cost is paid by parents, the taxpayers or the students themselves — an open-ended call for "more" seems like too many other open-ended commitments that have run up record national debts without any corresponding benefits.