education inflation.

so, there's this big push to get more people to go to college. and concommittant with that is the cry that college degrees are becoming worthless because too many people are getting them (i've already posted elsewhere about the push to outsource entry-level job training to educational insititutions, so i won't rehash my opinions on that).

and yet... it seems as though the conversation is a bit one-sided. or at least, those mostly partaking of the conversation are coming from a specific, possibly skewed context.

less than one-third of american adults over 25 have an undergraduate degree. and this is a high, recently passing the 30% mark, as the article notes.*

i dunno. maybe if we actually started thinking about education as education, and took a wider look at where we actually are, the conversation might change. with less than one third of the population having even undergraduate degrees, i don't think that increasing that number will have a huge economic effect any time soon. approaching 50%, then i could see the panic.

although, reflecting... apparently the majority of jobs out there don't require a degree since the majority of adults don't have one. i mean, unemployment isn't that high. on the other hand, assuming we get more people in the workforce with critical thinking skills, even those jobs can theoretically be done better.

on yet another hand, if the majority of the workforce is kept from getting a higher education, and especially an education specializing in teaching them how to think instead of just how to manipulate a widget, that keeps the power in the hands of those who already have it. hmm...

well. full disclosure. i also come from a context where i would never have guessed that the attainment rate is only about 30% for the country (i thought it was higher).

*i tried to find the actual data, but the link for the 2011 report only goes to an "about" page. since the article only says "more than 30%" i'm taking that as journalist-speak for "30.01%-32.99%" on the assumption that "one third!" would have made a better headline if they could have used it. the 2009 report says that 28% have completed undergraduate degrees.