The number of people going to college has gone up from the 1970’s, though the concentration of college graduates is not equal, in some states it is around 15%, in others it approaches 50. More importantly, the other factor in that is just how many ‘colleges’ we have today, what once were business schools now call themselves colleges, and then you have the growth of for profit and online schools as well, and it is hard to tell if they have caused the population to me more educated, or simply are marks on a piece of paper. It is pretty sad when people get through college, that usually have general ed courses, yet for example, when you give them the text of the Bill of Rights cannot tell you the meaning and depth of those rights or give you a general idea of how they have been applied. Supposedly they ask college graduates in polls to say when the civil war happened, and a basic description of the why’s of it, and many of them can’t and so forth.
As far as the cost of college, it has gone up tremendously since the 1970’s and 1980’s, and more importantly, financial aid has been slashed since then, to get federal aid these days you need to be pretty damn poor, and the colleges themselves have substituted loans for the aid they used to give, all while raising tuition at multiples of the COA. When I went to NYU in the early 80’s, the total bill for tuition, room and board was a little over 10k, and I had significant aid (from the school), I was from a middle class background, my dad was an engineer. These days NYU’s total package is pushing towards 70K, and their aid unless you are pretty poor is pretty much nonexistent (and as an Alumnus of the place, I would tell any perspective students to either make the push and try an Ivy, the difference in standards is not that big a gap these days, or go to a school that is good and gives you a decent aid package. The Ivies are much better with aid, and NYU simply isn’t worth the cost IMO, it is way, way overselling what it is, and it is putting on a big show while not delivering on what it gives for the money). In the past 30-35 years schools have become expensive, states have slashed funding for the state schools, especially the state flagships, and also have increased recruiting of kids from out of state and foreign countries, to get kids who pay full freight (there was a long article not long ago about the state flagship schools, and how they themselves are becoming more and more elite, rather than trying to educate the best and brightest of their own state), in many ways they have become not for profit businesses, where branding and markets and prestige matter more than making sure they educate as many kids as possible. Much of the increased costs, which conservatives are right about, have been in administrators and rock star heads of schools, with the salaries to match, and in building expensive facilities and hiring rock star faculty as well (NYU just spent umpteen millions buying townhouses n NYC, to be used to attract rock star faculty that will ‘put them on the map’). Conservatives point out, rightfully,that these schools build up endowments, but then use it, instead of in aid to students, to do the kind of things I am talking about (conservatives do share some of the blame, it has been conservatives arguing that financial aid is a ‘frill’ we cannot afford, and have been one of the reasons spending on state schools has been slashed, they have more than helped making colleges more and more unaffordable).
There is another factor, that in large part kids these days are more and more encouraged to learn ‘only the important things’, so we have kids going through schools that rely on standardized tests, and their knowledge is basically “learn this for some stupid test, then forget it”. Likewise , in college, even when taking the general ed courses, the kids tend to take classes that might be’useful’, so for example economics in some programs can count towards a philosophy requirement (it did at NYU back in the early 80’s), so kids will all want to take that, instead of a course let’s say on political theory. I took courses in history and in a course called “Power and Politics” that was pretty eye opening (the power in politics course was taught by two teachers, one of whom was the stereotype of the ‘liberal mush head’ Reagan would call them, the other, well, somewhere off to the right of Attila the Hun, but both were very, very good at teaching, were open about their biases, and made kids think).
We have this idea in society these days that only certain things are worth learning, mostly ‘practical’ stuff (kind of like the 3 “Rs” of primary education), so even college kids are coming out not knowing a lot of things, which is sad. It is funny, I used to think some of the comp sci courses I took for my degree were useless, that they were about arcane number theory, theoretical constructs, or with things like computer architecture, irrelevant to what I would be doing. What I realized later on that in their daily lives, few programmers outside system engineers worry about, for example, writing that efficient sort algorithm and use the analysis of algorithms methodologies the teach to see how well it works (with all the sort routines out there in any language you can name, would be idiotic to remake the wheel), or care about boolean algebra in their daily work, but knowing those things helps with other things, often unrelated to what you directly are doing, it is one of the differences between someone with an associates degree from a tech school and someone with a CS degree.
That brings back memories.