NEW YORK, NY Sept. 7 (DPI) – The Wall Street Journal published a report on the growth in the number of college degrees not leading to productivity gains – which of course led to a predictable chorus of sneers on the comment board about the value of certain college majors.

But this big-picture comment was especially insightful:

“Productivity has lagged because there’s been no new big breakthroughs in tech for about a decade.The ’70s were about business computing, the ’80s were about the PC and chips, the ’90s were about software and the internet, and the ’00s were about the vast global networks of the cloud and smartphones. But for the ’10s, what’s been the big tech innovation of the last decade?Even new developments like AI and quantum computing are still mostly just promises. Biotech has made strides but there’s been no big innovation that has changed everybody’s lives. 5G may someday change our lives but not yet. Autonomous driving is still in the lab. We’re nearing the end of Moore’s Law in chips and the internet is now a fully mature technology.What’s needed is not productivity but innovation, and there’s no clear correlation between that and the number of college degrees.”

2Chantal Bolstein and Bruce Schwartz1 CommentLikeCommentShare