That's a lot of rhetoric, but I don't know if your response is any more substantive. At least if we're talking about college degrees rather than high school diplomas, OP may be correct: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-American-adults-had...

We sent a man to the moon in 1969. At the time, half of Americans didn't have a high school diploma, and just 10% had a college degree. In the 1940s and early 1950s, when we broke the sound barrier and invented nuclear power, maybe 7% of Americans had a college degree, and just a third had a high school diploma.

Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook? It's not clear to me that college diplomas are adding value. I think a society with universal K-10 education, plus a handful of people getting college degrees in areas that really require it (medicine, engineering) could build pretty much anything a society can build. They might build even more--they wouldn't be wasting a big chunk of their youth in school.

> Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook?

Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did. As was almost every notable invention and discovery of the past 80 years.

This is not controversial.

> > Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook?

> Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did.

But Zuckerberg famously doesn't have a college degree so that can't possibly be the case...

And off the top of my head I'd also call the Apple computer and MS-DOS "notable" but that's just my personal (and apparently controversial) opinion.

Sure. The question. Is what is the benefit of sending the other 95% of people to college? Those people were certainly educated enough to operate the economy that underpinned and made those achievements possible.

I’m equally shocked by the fact that people value so much fictional piece of papers that are mostly borderline scams. I would exclude from that list only a handful of unis such as oxbridge, mit, Harvard and Stanford