WANT a real dog bites man story? A 27-year-old Bronx college graduate is not suing her alma mater because it failed to get her a job. But for four days, various media outlets and blogs have been peddling the claim that she is. It's certainly a juicy-sounding welfare-moms-with-Cadillacs-type anecdote. A quick internet search seems to show that the first paper to report it (on August 2nd) was the New York Post, ever a bastion of dispassionate reporting on urban issues (see "Wrong-Way Crash Mom Drunk, Stoned"), and one with no particular ideological axes to grind ("Send Doctor Bill To The Rich"). But other outlets, like CNN, spun the story the same way ("Alumna sues college because she hasn't found a job"), even though their own reporting showed it was wrong.

Fortunately, CNN did go the extra mile and link to a scan of the court filing. And that enabled a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog to see the distortion. The graduate is not suing Monroe College for failing to find her a job. She is suing because she alleges that the school's Office of Career Advancement did not try to find her a job, and that this abrogates the promises the school made when she paid them $70,000 in tuition. In the filing, she says the school's job counselors "are not making sure their e-recruiting clients call the graduates that recently finished college for a [sic] interview." Monroe's website says every student gets "a Career Advisor, who provides one-on-one assistance with career decision-making, resume and letter writing, and job search strategies." Based on what the graduate told CNN, she seems to think that the school promised her its job counselors would do more for her than they did.

That allegation may be without merit. Or it may not. Maybe the plaintiff is a confused young woman with an outsized sense of entitlement who blames her problems on others. Or maybe the college is deceptively advertising to low-income youth with poor secondary educations that it will help them get good jobs, encouraging them to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, when in fact its graduates rarely get good jobs, and its career counselors barely lift a finger to help them. Who knows? Not the New York Post or CNN. A court will decide whether the case deserves to be heard and, if so, whether in fact the school did promise to do more for its graduates than it did, and whether the graduate is entitled to redress.

Certainly, suing colleges is not a very effective way to address lower-class unemployment. But there's a real question as to whether going to college—or going to the kinds of colleges most lower-class people can afford, and plunging into debt to do so—is an effective way to address lower-class unemployment, either.

For decades, America's working class has been told that the way to cope with the labour market dislocation caused by globalisation—that is, with the fact that Chinese workers have taken all the factory jobs—is to get an education. For most poor people in New York, that doesn't mean Columbia, or for that matter the State University of New York. It means Monroe College, Apex Technical School, Kaplan University, and the other places one sees advertising on the subway for degrees as a medical secretary, HVAC technician, and so on. Many of these are good technical schools with high job-placement rates. But vocational and technical schools in America tend to set students back $60,000 or more for a bachelor's degree, and there are no guarantees. This isn't the only possible way to do things; in Germany's extensive vocational education system, employers are obliged by law to set aside a certain ratio of apprenticeships, so students will have someplace to go after they graduate. Obviously, the American economy is not set up that way. We have an entrepreneurial, no-guarantees, take-what-you-can-get economic culture, and it is hardly surprising that people want to get their money's worth.

Most people don't go to Monroe College to broaden their liberal-arts perspective. They go there to get a better-paying job. Maybe the school is doing all it can to make sure its graduates get those jobs, but if an alumna thinks the school is blowing her off, she is within her rights to take that complaint to court. The angry reaction to her case seems like an explosion of subconscious anxiety over two decades of working-class wage stagnation followed by a sudden wave of rising unemployment. For many, the strategy of educating America's way out of the global labour surplus isn't working. It sure didn't work for Trina Thompson. She is deep in debt, living with her mom, and still looking at a job at Burger King. Much of America's working class is in exactly the same fix. A change in strategy may be in order—suggestions welcome.