A dangerous idea has been gaining momentum within education-reform circles: Too many young people are going to college. Since Charles Murray took up this line in a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds and then in last year’s book Real Education, the idea has neared the mainstream. Though only directly addressed in a few words, this idea haunts nearly every page of Matthew B. Crawford’s otherwise excellent book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which made it up to number 17 and was listed as an editors’ choice on the New York Times Bestseller List. An article in National Review’s recent special issue on higher education argued that fewer students should go to college, and another argued that students who do go should spend less time there. I have repeatedly heard it ventured over the last year in conferences and in gatherings of policy wonks.

But while the idea that college should be only for the demonstrably qualified may look convincing at first glance, it turns out that the United States suffers from the opposite problem — too few college-educated workers to meet the challenges of our increasingly complicated society. The case that too many students are going to college comes through two arguments: that we have reached the zenith of our ability to produce students with the skills necessary to succeed in college, and that for marginal students, the economic returns from college are not as good as advertised. Neither of these critiques stand up to scrutiny.

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The critique of a policy of higher education for almost everybody rests on the conviction that perhaps a majority of young people inherently lack the cognitive ability to master genuinely college-level material, and that therefore even the best school systems can’t ready them for postsecondary education.

To prove this point, Murray reprints in Real Education some questions missed by eighth-grade students who took a standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Their failure to answer such simple questions accurately is astounding. For example, 32 percent of students chose the wrong answer to this question (meaning that if you count the students who guessed right by chance, about 40 percent didn’t know the answer):

What is 4 hundredths written in decimal notation?

(A) 0.0004   (B) 0.04   (C) 0.400   (D) 4.00   (E) 400.0

When a child reaches the eighth grade and does not know how to interpret decimals or the verbal instructions accompanying them, it’s tempting to think that he lacks the cognitive ability to do so, and thus to master the material necessary to succeed in college. But when such a high proportion of American eighth-graders lack these skills, and a disproportionate number of them are concentrated in inner-city schools, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a crucial part of the problem is the schools themselves, not genes or living conditions.

One piece of evidence is the success of schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School, which serves a population made up almost entirely of low-income minority students from its South Bronx neighborhood. To anyone walking around the school it is clear that these otherwise disadvantaged kids are thriving. On my visit there I witnessed fully engaged students who look you in the eye with rare confidence. Their writing samples tacked to the classroom walls suggest they are mastering the ability to think critically and convey their thoughts convincingly. The apparent excellence of this school was confirmed when the results of New York’s state assessments were released: 94 percent scored above the proficient level in English, and 99 percent of them met or exceeded this level in math. In contrast, about half of the students in the surrounding public school district, which most of these students would have attended had they not gained enrollment in this charter school, scored below the proficiency mark.

Even allowing for the fact that the poor families these kids come from are sufficiently motivated and informed to apply for admission, the evidence indicates that the key variable separating them from their public-school counterparts is the quality of schooling they receive: A recent study of charter schools in New York City (by a team led by Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby) found that kids who applied to charter schools and were admitted by lottery substantially outperformed those students who applied and were randomly denied seats. Putting their results in context, the researchers found that the average proficiency gains made by a student who attended a New York City charter school from kindergarten through the eighth grade are enough to close the gap between the average student in inner-city Harlem and the average student in Scarsdale (a wealthy New York suburb famous for the quality of its public schools) by about 86 percent in math and 66 percent in English. That is, when they attend high-quality schools, students who stand little chance of acquiring the proficiency necessary to attend college under the current system don’t look so different from upper-class suburban students for whom college attendance is a given.