Education, education, education. That’s the mantra we hear endlessly now from politicians, captains of industry, and pundits of all stripes. Education is the answer to our nation’s ills. But is it?

In 1967 an education journal reported that “…at the headquarters of a well-known corporation the elevator operators used to be grade school graduates. Now they have to be high school graduates. Veteran employees say that there has been no noticeable improvement in the elevator service as a result.”

When I showed this story to an eminent educator friend of mine he was totally unsurprised. The point, he said, was that the kind of people who used to get grade school diplomas now get high school diplomas. So it is natural for the employers to raise the bar. In other words, the diploma indicates not what you know but what kind of person you are. The content of the education is immaterial.

In the intervening years the focus has shifted from high school diplomas to college degrees. We are regularly reminded that college graduates earn (on average) more than high school graduates. But is this because of what students go through at college? Why should we believe that? There are two much more compelling reasons: one, it is the smart people who go to college, and two, employers use the degree as a sieve to reduce to manageable numbers the torrent of applications they receive. So the education system is simply acting as a filter, and a very expensive filter at that.

Just a little thought turns up the inevitable consequence: as young people try to leapfrog ahead, the requirements demanded go up. First, a high school diploma is required, then a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s degree. There is no end to this process. And meantime the process eats up vaster and vaster sums of money.

I am not talking about education for a specific skill, such as medicine or engineering. That apart, most people have jobs they did not learn in college. As Sarah Vowell of NPR puts it, “I went to college and learned never to invade Russia in the wintertime.”

The President of Yale asserted to Charlie Rose, and Charlie Rose lapped it up, that he and his colleagues are teaching students to analyze information. But where is the evidence that a student having gone through this process analyzes information better than if he or she had not? It is not possible to wind back the clock and see how a person would turn out following a different path. Statisticians may tell you they can do so with large populations, but with this issue they can’t. Certainly most Yale graduates earn enviable salaries, but rationally we must look first to the empirical explanation of this: they have “Yale” stamped on their foreheads.

There is a claim that were many more students to succeed in graduating from college, the economy would receive a huge boost from the high salaries they would earn and the taxes they would pay. But if the degree is just a filter, increasing the number of graduates doesn’t increase the number of jobs. And what about the law of supply and demand? If the supply of graduates goes up, the price will surely go down.

So is the march of qualification inflation inexorable? Certainly the Internet, ubiquitous PCs and email will continue to drive the machine-gun approach to applying for jobs. Employers will respond with more resume-filtering by computer, and the days when people were judged by personal qualities rather than labels will be long gone.

The paper chase has had an appalling effect on secondary education, where the emphasis is now increasingly on academics, partly in the effort to help students up the ladder, partly through snobbery. Classes in trades have been axed and students quite unsuited to academics are pushed into courses where they feel entirely out of place.

Apparently the Bush administration is worried about the university system. A Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been appointed. We are told they are toying with the idea of testing college students to see what they know. Cost is on the agenda – is it too much to hope they will ask what are we getting in return for all the trillions of dollars we are spending? Maybe they could shift some of it to the high schools. After all, what young people learn there can actually be useful.

Rory Johnston is a writer and broadcaster on science and technology based in Los Angeles. He was formerly a math teacher