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<p>To be clear, I’m not blaming the kids. Rather, I’m blaming the system. </p>
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<p>DunningLA’s latest post was brilliantly stated. The key difference between then and now is that in the old days, you didn’t really need to go to college to obtain most decent jobs. Hence, colleges would disproportionately draw upon that subset of people who actually cared about academics, leaving those who don’t care to head for the workforce that is more suited for them.</p>
<p>But nowadays, the ‘arms race’ of college degrees forces people to attend college whether they are academically inclined or not, simply to avoid sending the ‘negative signal’ to the labor market that they lack a degree. College graduates abound aplenty, which means that employers are free to discriminate in favor of degree holders. Why not - I as a employer would do the same - because doing so is costless to me. After all, I as the employer am not the one paying for the degrees (except perhaps partially and indirectly through higher corporate taxes to support public universities). That expense has to be borne almost exclusively by the students themselves, perhaps leavened with some financial aid from the university. Employers are therefore offloading a tremendous cost upon job applicants to even be considered for a decent job. </p>
<p>Imagine instead a world where employers who choose to screen for college degrees amongst job applicants had to reimburse the entire tuitions of those degree-holders (or at least, the tuitions of those that they choose to hire). I suspect that the vast majority of employers would then choose to stop screening for degrees. That strongly indicates that employers are only screening for degrees because they currently don’t have to pay for them, and so they attach less worth to that screening function than what colleges choose to charge their students. </p>
<p>The upshot is that more and more students who are otherwise unsuited for college are heading there anyway for the sole purpose of keeping up with the academic ‘arms race’. Nobody wants to be the outlier who sends out the negative market signal by lacking a degree. We may therefore be moving towards a Prisoner’s Dilemma where every individual actor is behaving rationally, but towards an equilibrium point that is clearly suboptimal for society as a whole. The more people who spend to obtain college degrees, the more that a degree becomes necessary to remain competitive in the labor market, thereby inducing still more people to spend still more to obtain degrees. A PhD may someday become an entry-level requirement just to answer phones and make coffee.</p>