It’s that time of year when the subjects of “education” and “jobs” are inextricably linked. When the economy is good, the stories are about go-getting recent graduates, and how they’re changing the world, etc. Universities then use this publicity to argue for more research money. “Look at all the great stuff our graduates do,” they say. “Our education gets kids jobs!”

When the economy is bad, on the other hand, universities are subject to variations of Margaret Wente’s recent irritating rant. “You’re failing our kids,” they say. “Why are students spending tens of thousands of dollars on sociology degrees that don’t lead to jobs? Why can’t universities be more job-oriented?” To which the universities reply: “Why are you picking on us? We didn’t start the recession!”

This dance plays itself out with metronomic regularity. Read newspapers from 1982 or 1993 and they all sound like Ms. Wente today. Read them in the midst of a two-decade boom and apparently universities are so fantastic that we can’t shovel money into them fast enough.

The basic problem here is that neither side is being entirely honest.

Start with the university position. Universities know perfectly well that in many fields of study they have no idea how well their education “gets kids jobs.” To a significant extent the value of a degree comes not from the value of any skills obtained (“human capital theory”) but simply from having been admitted to university and demonstrating an ability to stick it out through four years of instruction (“signaling theory”). The problem is that universities have to assert that human capital theory is true, because that’s almost the entire rationale for the large sums of public funding they receive. So when times are good, they’re incapable of restraining themselves from proclaiming their “successes” in this area – which unfortunately makes it hard to escape the “failure” tag when times are bad.

Then there’s the pro-Wente position. If they were being honest, these critics would recognize that exactly the same education that they claim is completely useless was delivering graduate unemployment rates of 3-4% just a couple of years ago. Has the world of work changed so massively? Has tuition changed massively, or student debt? No, we just happen to be going through the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The independent variable here is Lehman Brothers, not sociology curricula.

That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons to think more deeply about curriculum and how it can be made more valuable to students. But it is to say that this debate involves a disappointingly high ratio of smack-talk to sense. Everybody needs to take a valium and focus on real issues.