The reporter's formulation misses four crucial points. First, colleges admit those freshmen who have done the best in high school. In other words, college students are pre-screened for the willingness and ability to conform to the requirements of a bureaucratic system. Schools and employers are both bureaucratic systems, though neither much wants to admit this.
Second, college freshmen are pre-screened for higher intelligence, via the SAT test scores. Colleges brag about the average SAT scores of their freshmen for good reason.
Third, much learning in college is social learning. Typically, college graduates learn social skills which enable them to "fit in" to middle and upper middle class society. These skills will likely not be reflected in the Collegiate Learning Assessment test which measures critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.
Fourth, employers use a college degree as a minimum requirement for many entry-level jobs. By doing so, they put those jobs, and the jobs above them in the promotion ladder, off-limits to young people without the degree. Employers do this because it is an efficient way to limit the applicant pool to intelligent, bureaucratically savvy, socially adept candidates.
None of these four points asks whether students have learned much in college that an achievement test can measure. Yet all are factors in the individual's subsequent success in life, if success is measured by being employed and earning a good salary.
A widely quoted statistic is that, even in these tough times, unemployment among college graduates is running about 5%. Meanwhile it is almost twice that high for the society at large. A college degree definitely helps us "have a good life" even if we learn relatively little while getting it.
