Jay Schalin is director of state policy for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. If the United States is really serious about competing with the work-centered countries of Asia, the key lies not in more government programs, but in restoring America’s own work-centered culture. The first step toward accomplishing this is to end the over-subsidization of higher education, which creates incentives for many to postpone work. As the Occupy Wall Street protests have exposed, the United States already has vast numbers of underemployed, indebted young people who have college degrees, but few marketable skills. If we want to correct this problem we need to make the period after high school more focused on work and not an unnecessary extension of adolescence.... If 50 percent, rather than 70 percent, of North Carolina’s high school graduates attended college, North Carolina taxpayers would save as much as $800 million per year. That’s real economic stimulus.