Some labor-market analysts are questioning whether the administration's emphasis on a formal college education is wise public policy.

They contend that skills -- regardless of whether they are acquired through private training firms, family, friends, computers or employers -- show a stronger correlation with future employment and earnings potential than does formal education.

• A 1993 Bureau of Labor Statistics study revealed that only one in three college graduates -- and one of five workers with between one and three years of college -- said they were currently in jobs that required skills they learned in college.

• Moreover, the study found that workers identified formal and informal employer-provided training as the most important source of such training -- with two- and four-year colleges playing a relatively minor role.

• The BLS research established that high school graduates whose jobs required specific training as well as additional skills-improvement training earned slightly more than college graduates who had not obtained either type of training.

• A 1995 U.S. Trust survey found that fewer than half of America's top wage-earners had completed college and almost 30 percent had never attended college.

Critics say these findings tend to call into question a policy which seems to promote education for education's sake. They advocate matching workers' occupational choices with an appropriate public or private provider of education and training -- rather than sending as many people as possible to college.

One approach they propose is the establishment of tax-free "educational savings accounts" which could be used to pay tuition and buy education and training from private firms or employers -- a far better alternative, they say, than another round of federal aid to the higher education industry.

Source: John Hood (John Locke Foundation), Investor's Business Daily, April 15, 1997.

How Much Does College Pay?

How important is it to have a college diploma if one is to sell ties in a department store? Is it necessary to have a M.B.A. to manage a video rental store? The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the latter as a job requiring a college education.

Through most of this decade, the percentage of college graduates in jobs that do not require a college degree has been remarkably high, specialists point out.

• At least one in five employed B.A. graduates was in a job not requiring college training, according to a 1994 BLS survey.

• With the median annual income of Americans in the workforce with no more than a B.A. degree being barely $34,000 last year, college is not a guarantee of later riches.

• A study financed by the MacArthur Foundation established that 9.2 percent of the working poor in Chicago have B.A. degrees.

While few would dispute the value of a college education -- both to the individual and society -- some economists hold that universal college education is not a national panacea and is probably a waste of time and resources for some students.

To the argument that college is a necessity in our rapidly developing hi-tech society, they point out that elementary school youngsters are already surfing the 'net.

Source: Thomas Geoghegan (author and lawyer), "Overeducated and Underpaid," New York Times, June 3, 1997.