I added the clause: "With no student loan debt to worry about!" above. That's an important aspect, I think. They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example) where as now people have to consider how they're going to pay back that debt and choose degrees in fields that will enable them to do so.

> They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example)

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.

Still more debt free graduates today than total graduates in the 50s/60s.

It isn’t obvious from your link… what % of current grads are “business majors” who don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy and justify it with fancy PowerPoint slide decks?

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.

You’re right that the business major has metastasized, while the education major has shrunk.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...

"don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy" - this is a pretty bad faith take, and also simply not true. In the US at least, business grads typically take accounting courses, marketing courses, even statistics courses. All of those skills lead to jobs that can provide both societal and economic value.

My personal experience says otherwise, but I’ll concede that accounting does have value.

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.

Maybe the problem now is we have too many college educated people and not enough high paying jobs to offset the cost of those people's education costs. Leading to #1 people working terrible jobs they were not educated for, #2 leaving these same people with a huge boulder of student loan debt that is hard to be paid off due to #1. Its a classic problem of supply and demand. In addition people's degree choices do not reflect the markets needs, way too many people went into communication/sociology/LA stuff than what the market wants which are STEM.

IMHO I think part of the problem is that there's been a shift in how degrees are interpreted. It used to be someone wasn't equated with their degree so closely, like a branding. The idea of a liberal arts degree was not to be unknowledgeable about STEM, but diversified.

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.

But the claim wasnt that there aren’t more college grads now, and there’s no need for the ad hominem first sentence.