It's funny, a Treasury paper from a 1994 conference in Canberra [1] looks like the oeuvre on the topic. Everything more recently has focused on rising productivity as a desired effect instead of an a priori cause.
The paper concludes that in the short-run, rising productivity decreases inflation, increases the current account balance, increases GDP, and increases unemployment (and real wages) as aggregate supply increases without a commensurate increase in aggregate demand. The system starts equilibrating as people internalise the higher productivity into their investment assumptions.
We could see falling rates on student loans coupled with rising returns on education (note: not just college education, as the OP pointed out) as increasing the incentive to invest in one's education. Given that our culture creates barriers to education the older one gets it seems like we will have a wasted generation of un-skilled workers who will just need to be worked through the system (being a cold, pragmatic macroeconomist here). Being civil to those people without incurring undue cost to the system will be the challenge.
The paper concludes that in the short-run, rising productivity decreases inflation, increases the current account balance, increases GDP, and increases unemployment (and real wages) as aggregate supply increases without a commensurate increase in aggregate demand. The system starts equilibrating as people internalise the higher productivity into their investment assumptions.
We could see falling rates on student loans coupled with rising returns on education (note: not just college education, as the OP pointed out) as increasing the incentive to invest in one's education. Given that our culture creates barriers to education the older one gets it seems like we will have a wasted generation of un-skilled workers who will just need to be worked through the system (being a cold, pragmatic macroeconomist here). Being civil to those people without incurring undue cost to the system will be the challenge.
[1] http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/239/PDF/paper07.pdf