https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...
I also wonder how much of that growth is from high school students being told to go to college above all else, and how this graduation increase corresponds to enrollment and graduation from vocational schools.
I do think your point is the big one: people could go into college and come out with knowledge in the so-called soft skills, like philosophy or literature (areas that don't pay well but are vital for a society to understand itself, if nothing else). Why society doesn't value teaching and similar jobs as much as it does other industries is left as a debate for another time.
The number of grads may have gone way up, but I think the education itself had slid down the slippery slope to create too many administrators and bureaucrats.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...
Marketing? Well, we can disagree there — to me marketing is making a science out of “parting fools with their money”, so to speak. It’s always felt fundamentally dishonest and a little dirty. But again, thats me and I am definitely biased.
Now you have automated HR depts and someone is equated with their degree one way or another. It's not really that different from ads for knowledge of particular programming library, when the potential hire clearly could pick it up in a week based on their other experiences.
This isn't all of it of course but I do think people tend to be treated as objects, no more or less than their degrees or certifications to a greater extent than the past. It's the dark side of meritocracy in my opinion, which is a horrendous mislabel.
Sometimes I feel as if we live in a world of formalized stereotyping, where the stereotypes have shifted from race and sex to some extent, to political, employment, and degree stereotypes.
And it wasn't just journalism. After WWII many veterans took advantage of the free education offered by the GI Bill. That gave us a lot of highly educated people (with no student loan debt to worry about!) who then went on to use that education to improve things. Couple this with the recent memory of fascism in Europe and The Civil Rights movement and we had sort of a golden era. We were able to live off the fumes of that era until right around the end of the 20th century. You could say that in a sense things are just returning back to a more normal state of affairs and this seems painful because many of us lived through an era that was unusually good.