> A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value.
Sticking with the same analogy: if you rapidly increase the amount of money in circulation, its value falls. The people whose wages and prices are rising in tandem experience little net change. But people whose wages don't rise suffer from the rising prices.
College is undergoing the same process. The fraction of people who go to college is up significantly. All those new degrees have pushed the absolute value of a degree down, which is why college is no longer an automatic path to high-paying, white-collar work. But at the same time, people without degrees are left ever further behind, and the relative gap between college and no-college is bigger than ever.
Sticking with the same analogy: if you rapidly increase the amount of money in circulation, its value falls. The people whose wages and prices are rising in tandem experience little net change. But people whose wages don't rise suffer from the rising prices.
College is undergoing the same process. The fraction of people who go to college is up significantly. All those new degrees have pushed the absolute value of a degree down, which is why college is no longer an automatic path to high-paying, white-collar work. But at the same time, people without degrees are left ever further behind, and the relative gap between college and no-college is bigger than ever.