It's How You Start, Not How You Finish

Here's just one example of how education policy affects other economic areas of our lives. A solution offered by many to solve our oncoming Social Security crisis is to have people work longer. The logic goes that medical science means people today live longer, healthier lives, and they can therefore continue adding to rather than drawing from our national pension plan.
Nice idea, but it's flawed. Yes, old age no longer guarantees decrepitude. But that's uncertain. Your body does still start breaking down more quickly in your 60s. Your mind, too. The older workforce is unstable.
The younger workforce, however, is not. That's why I suggest that if we want to add working years for people, we should front-load them, rather than tack them on at the end. That's done by getting more people earning money earlier. Today, we're moving the other way. The answer is not sending more people to college to make them better educated. The answer is making sure people are better educated so they don't have to go to college.