A record number of freshmen will descend upon campuses in the coming days. Just in time for the first day of classes, but too late for the application process, is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Choosing the Right College. But as I write @ FrontPageMag, choosing the right college for many of the 3.5-million-plus freshmen would have meant choosing no college at all.

I could not agree more.

In my day, a college degree was a bonus in life as not everyone was going to get one.

Today the expectation, even for those not really prepared or qualified, is to go to some kind of institution of higher learning. It's been a boon for the college loan industry but has truly watered down what it means to have the credentials.

The other end of the equation is that kids float through four years of soft classes and are completely unprepared to really do anything that would be of value to a company or small business.

I was thinking about this this morning. My son has two room mates who graduated from prestigious colleges. One is a landscape coordinator and the other is (having to take classes after college) a graphic designer.

$200k per for an education that didn't get them much further than a good high school curriculum might have.

I think there are two things at work here.

First, I suspect some employers are looking for college graduates in hopes that at the end of college, the graduates will have learned what previous generations had learned before they were issued high school diplomas.

Second, a lot of employers are using a college degree as a substitute for testing, which a lot of employers used before a series of dubious court rulings made pre-employment testing difficult. When the courts began to reconsider the rulings, Congress stepped in and wrote the reversed court decisions into law.

At the turn of the century, most people had only an eighth grade education. Unless one was wealthy or incredibly gifted, the expectation was that you finished school when you either showed no aptitude for it or you were old enough to work. And that's what most did.

Many of the great innovators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were people who were products of the eighth year of schooling and in general most of that era were the most productive of our time.

Now, we have a population that for the most part are the results of sixteen years of education and fewer are productive or innovative to any real degree.

Even those who have technologically transformed the late 20th into the aughts were, by in large, kids who may had started but never finished college.

The key is that there are lessons that can not be taught in a classroom and sometimes real world practical experience that requires a certain amount of mental or physical sweat trumps institutional learning.

There is no better proof of this than to observe the incompetent, over-educated political class that we currently have running this country.