A college degree doesn’t keep people out of jail

Sorry, Bernie. You’re wrong on two levels.

Go to college or go to jail? That’s the choice that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seems to think confronts America’s youth.

The other day, Sanders tweeted: “At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.”

Sanders’ comments carried the same elitist tinge that marked John Kerry’s unfortunate remarks in 2006: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Kerry’s comment created a firestorm of criticism — and, if I recall correctly, some amusing commentary from troops actually in Iraq — because it both overstated the value of education and cast unfair aspersions on soldiers serving in Iraq.

Sanders’ remarks created a similar backlash. They’re wrong on two levels: First, going to college doesn’t necessarily keep you out of jail; there are plenty of criminals with college degrees. Second, not going to college hardly puts you “on a path to jail.”

It’s true, of course, that people in jail are probably less likely to have college degrees. But that’s probably because the same things that put them in jail — poor impulse control, say, or an inability to think long-term — also keep them out of college. Sending peo- ple with poor impulse control to college probably won’t make them better.

A cynic might suspect that Bernie Sanders — who gets a lot of support from people who work at colleges and universities — is just playing the old politician’s game of making sure that plenty of money goes to people and industries who support him.

But he’s probably just making a classic mistake, one that created the housing crisis: The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle-class people have. If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people.

But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re evidence of the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. (I would dub this rule “Reynolds’ Law,” except that someone else already did.)

So Bernie’s wrong. If fewer college-educated people are in jail, it’s not because of anything college did to keep them out. If you want fewer people in jail, you need to encourage the traits that form non-criminal personalities. That’s a process that starts much, much earlier than college.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.