During this campaign season, I’m seeing a lot of North Carolina politicians promise to address the state’s economic woes by helping more young people receive university degrees. In my view, this is not a serious policy proposal. It is just political pandering.

Stung by rising tuition and falling real incomes, many families are struggling with college costs. I understand that. But among the reasons why university tuition has been rising faster than the prices of most other goods and services are: 1) the widespread assumption that everyone must go to a university to get a good job, and 2) the widespread practice of administrators raising tuition to capture most of the value of government grants and loan subsidies.

While it is true that, on average, university graduates are better paid than high-school graduates, that doesn’t mean that higher education is necessarily beneficial on the margin. That is, no one disputes getting a bachelor’s degree on your way to graduate study and a career in fields such as law, medicine, and engineering will probably result in a significant boost in lifetime earnings. And few dispute that getting a bachelor’s degree in a high-demand field such as science and technology can deliver a big economic payoff.

But neither of these facts can be used to predict the potential benefits to students in other situations. For those majoring in more esoteric subjects such as art history or philosophy, for example, or who are destined for jobs that don’t require a university degree, the cost of spending four to six years on campus – both in student expenses and in foregone wages – may exceed the economic benefits.

They may well enjoy the campus experience. And the study of art history and philosophy can have great personal value. But these are not arguments for treating their university degrees as an investment in future employability or income – or for compelling taxpayers to subsidize it.

How many students will actually end up in jobs that don’t require university degrees? Quite a few, if the Bureau of Labor Statistics is an accurate predictor of job-market trends. In a January 2012 study, BLS predicted that over the next eight years, 69 percent of all job vacancies will be for positions that do not require a college education. Another 11 percent of positions will require some amount of college education short of a four-year degree.

These percentages are not much different from the current distribution of job requirements, by the way. And a 2008 study found that one-third of college graduates worked at occupations such as food service, retail sales, or customer service that do not require a college degree. As you can see, a policy of maximizing university attendance is not particularly relevant to the real demands of the job market.

The key measure for evaluating the value of higher education isn’t attainment. It’s not about sheepskins or credentials. It’s about the knowledge and skills that future workers acquire. In their book Who’s Not Working and Why, economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer report that college graduates whose ability to read, writing, and compute is the same as their peers who didn’t go college have not seen increases in wages or employment since 1970. Those with high functional literacy after college, especially in professional fields, have seen large wage gains since 1970 and earn substantially more than do other college graduates.

“In sum,” they write, “skill-biased technical change has resulted in a faster increase in demand for workers with high cognitive skills than the increase in supply. It is these university graduates who are experiencing an increase in real wages. For the other university graduates, by way of contrast, the supply is greater than the demand. As a result, their wages are stagnating.”

Instead of focusing so much attention on a single possible destination for high-school graduates – universities – North Carolina leaders should fashion policies that assist families no matter what choices they make. That means more career and technical education in high school. And it means replacing the current panoply of subsidies and tax credits for college with a universal tax deduction for all educational investment.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.