Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration It's funny, but I got a whole lot more of that stuff after dropping out. Am I really going to learn more from a place where I don't pay the rent, buy stuff with a meal card, work fifteen hours per week but don't necessarily have to show up, and am surrounded by proto-alcoholics? If you can deduce the modern college experience from any sane set of first principles, I'd like to hear about it -- but it seems to me that Murray is right. If we didn't have college, and you tried to invent it, you'd be rightly denounced as a loon.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes; studying for the SAT can raise scores a lot at first, but if you studied two hours per day for 150 days, your expected score increase would be seventy points. Murray cites this (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...), which I haven't read. It would be a good plan to introduce your convictions to some data, so you can back up your assertion with something besides "I used to do test prep, and envy rich people too much to wonder what I can learn from them."
Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.
You also might be happier if 1) you didn't assume that the newspaper that recently published a Barbara Ehrenreich piece (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121380066376984...) was irredeemably right-wing, and 2) if you considered the possibility that since college professors are overwhelmingly liberal (http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_cellasreview_arc...) and nearly impossible to fire, they would consist of a greater than average number of liberals who do, indeed, have too much influence.