The Falls

There was a lot of predictable news last week.

Dino Rossi announced he’s running for governor. The homeless tent city disbanded – only to reband. And public college tuition increased at about double the rate of inflation, 6.6 percent.

Every time tuition goes steeply rising, someone points out that a college education remains a good deal over a lifetime. A college grad earns more than a high school grad. Someone with a master’s degree earns more than someone with a BA. And so on.

But that’s only a relative comparison. The simple economic fact is, the more college graduates there are, the less they’re worth in the marketplace.

In Spokane, for example, the general population is much more educated now than it was in 1970, census figures show – there are fewer high school dropouts and more college graduates. But the median income hasn’t moved all that much. And the percentage of people living in poverty has actually risen, from 13.5 percent in 1969 to 17.3 percent in 2005.

The overall economy levels all this education downward. As more people get college degrees, they become relatively less valuable – even as, ironically, they become more necessary just to compete.

It’s becoming a worse deal with every passing year.