Alex Tabarok at Marginal Revolution recently asked an interesting question that has spread quickly across the blogosphere – is college oversold? I think this question is going to get asked a lot more as the economic slowdown wears on, so it’s worth examining.

Basically, Tabarok notes that U.S. enrolment in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects has been stagnant over the last couple of decades, whereas enrolment in “softer” subjects with allegedly (no data is provided) lower rates of return, such as psychology, visual arts and journalism is way, way up. On this basis, he suggests that “college has been oversold.”

This is an interesting way of phrasing the problem to say the least. Who is doing the alleged overselling, exactly? And what motives might they have for doing so?

Let me suggest some alternate theories that might explain this phenomenon:

1) Perhaps it’s a symptom of colleges being underfunded. Government dollars have been tight even while demand is increasing. Perhaps American universities – like universities almost everywhere in the entire world – have reacted to this problem by bulking up on social science programs that are cheap to deliver while keeping a lid on more expensive science and engineering programs.

2) Perhaps it’s just universities reacting to demand. When we curse crappy reality TV for things like Jersey Shore, we don’t just blame the networks for airing it; deep down that what we’re really cursing is the taste of the viewing public. Same thing here: maybe the consumers of education, not the producers, are to blame.

3) Perhaps it’s students looking at ROI in terms other than dollars. Prestige, for instance. Decades of over-production of lawyers haven’t dimmed the allure of law degrees in Latin America, because of the prestige factor; maybe the same thing’s going on with journalism in the U.S. Or “fit”: students don’t feel connected to science and engineering when they apply to university so they discount the potential monetary gains by thinking about how much, deep down, they hate lab work and how much they’d give up to avoid it.

4) Finally, maybe students are just acting like rational consumers. Returns to engineering – especially computer science – have been highly volatile in the last two decades. Plus, as we’re repeatedly told, Indian programmers can kick Americans’ butts at a tenth the price. Does that sound like an industry to which you’d want to commit your future?

I’m not saying any of these are necessarily full explanations for the problem of overproduction of graduates in fields with low ROI. I’m just saying they are valid – but less emotive – hypotheses to rival the “we’ve been sold a bill of goods” line of argument. They deserve equal billing.