Educational Explosion: The Damage of Unnecessary Advanced Degrees
21st May 2024
The percentage of U.S. adults holding an advanced degree increased by over 3% from 2011-2021. This increase in education is assumed to have a crucial role in America’s increasing economic strength over that time period. The expertise gained from such degrees is supposed to be valuable enough to outweigh the time and money put into grad degrees, both from the student’s perspective and the perspective of the schools and institutions that so often fund graduate degrees. In developing countries, college graduation rates are positively correlated with economic success. This same effect is thought to translate to America’s current explosion of higher education. This belief is held so strongly that the federal government spent 311,000,000,000 dollars on higher education in 2021.
However, a high advanced degree rate is much less strongly linked to national and individual success than universities would like you to think.
Unfortunately, when everybody goes to college, going to college doesn’t put you ahead of other applicants for a job.
Not to mention that the degeneration of the educational system means that employers need to specify a college degree in order to find people with the amount of eduction that fifty years ago we could expect high school graduates to have.