Kay Heimowitz writes about degree inflation for City Journal, and does a mostly thorough job. A key quote is this pithy observation.
Degree inflation widens the nation’s class divide.
Oddly, in an otherwise comprehensive discussion going back to the days when a high school diploma was somewhat rare, she leaves out a major force in degree inflation - the G.I. Bill. Perhaps she thought criticizing it was a bridge too far, it can be a bit of a sacred cow in our society. Let me remedy her omission.
As World War II drew toward an end, politicians and economists began to worry about the nearly inevitable recession/depression that tended to follow wars. They pictured literally hundreds of thousands of young men, and a few women, swapping their uniforms for civvies and looking for jobs.
Their concern was that the job vacancies would not increase as quickly as would the supply of people needing them. What could be done to slow the near-avalanche of job seekers following war's end as the military shrank back to peacetime staffing levels and ex-soldiers and sailors became unemployed.
The answer they came up with was the G.I. Bill, let's send 'em to college and by the time they get out the economy will have caught up, the politicians thought. Incidentally, they were right, it worked but had an unintended consequence.
Meantime the young men in the military had spent something like 1-4 years growing up, experiencing a blue-collar job called "enlisted man," and many jumped at the chance to do something better.
The new college graduates began flooding the job market in 1947-50. Personnel Departments (as Human Resources was then known) began to raise the bar for entry level jobs.
Why would they do this? They faced a tall stack of job applications, and a need to winnow these down to a manageable number to consider seriously. Tossing out everyone without a college degree was not only practical, it could be justified to top management as hiring a smarter, more educated work force.
New high school graduates looked at the competition, a raft of ex-GIs with degrees, and decided they too needed to go to college just to be competitive in the job market. And that was the beginning of how we got to where we are today, where you basically need a masters degree (or higher) to have any edge.
