A recent Wall Street Journal commentary examined the value of a bachelor’s degree, adding fuel to simmering discussions of the student debt crisis, young adult unemployment, rising tuition, and degrees without workplace relevance.The piece by Jeffrey J. Selingo should be read in its entirety, but here’s a sample.

Think a community-college degree is worth less than a credential from a four-year college? In Tennessee, the average first-year salaries of graduates with a two-year degree are $1,000 higher than those with a bachelor’s degree. Technical degree holders from the state’s community colleges often earn more their first year out than those who studied the same field at a four-year university.

Take graduates in health professions from Dyersburg State Community College. They not only finish two years earlier than their counterparts at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, but they also earn $5,300 more, on average, in their first year after graduation.

In Virginia, graduates with technical degrees from community colleges make $20,000 more in the first year after college than do graduates in several fields who get bachelor’s degrees.

Without saying STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) he underscores the value of STEM education. It’s worth repeating given the attention recently given to an report by the labor backed Economic Policy Institute that implausibly contends there’s no shortage of STEM graduates. I mention EPI in this post.

Tyler Cowen makes the right point here.  It’s a short post, so rather than lifting it I encourage you to visit the link. Also a nice response in a letter to the Seattle Times from the executive director of inSPIRE STEM USA, who writes,

One flaw is that the study uses the category of “information science,” which includes librarians, social scientists and other professions that artificially inflate the pool of STEM workers.

The reality is the U.S. economy will produce about 120,000 computer-science jobs annually through 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, we only produce 40,000 bachelor’s degrees in that field each year.

The shortage of STEM workers in our state has been well-documented, most recently in research done for the Washington Roundtable from the Boston Consulting Group. I wrote about it in this column.

Not all degrees add marketplace value. STEM degrees do. And there’s a demand for them.