The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment projections developed by…

The recent response by Anthony Carnevale et al. to the authors' analysis of the fundamental shortcomings associated with their predictions of widespread college labor shortages focuses on three areas. First, Anthony Carnevale et al. suggest that the authors are educational Luddites by noting in the title of their response that the authors believe…

The authors examine how the American economy has experienced sharp contractions in overall levels of output, income, and wealth resulting from the recent financial crisis, and how these losses have had an impact on the nation's labor market. The significance of these trends to American higher education is summarized in these terms: "Large labor…