raynier is saying it's not clear that more people going to college is better. raynier is certainly not the first person to say that. How it relates to the Moon is that sending a man to the Moon is evidence of scientific progress, and it shows that scientific progress was happening even when many fewer people went to college.
The reason there are more college graduates today in the US is that the US labour market requires more college graduates than it did in the 60's. Partly because the available jobs today have higher requirements, and partly because of credential inflation.
Now, having your domestic labour market require more and more educated workers is a good thing, because it means that your country is moving up the value chain. You're getting rid of low qualified, easily automatable, easily outsourcable jobs, and replacing them with higher-value jobs that (presumably) produce more value per worker.
Therefore, it is in your nation's interest to keep this process going, to make sure there's an ever-increasing stream of highly educated people entering the labour force. And if it's in your nation's interest, it might be worth spending tax money on it, and not leave the process up to for-profit companies whose incentives do not align with the national interest.
That's completely false. Yes, the engineers and mathematicians and astronauts had degrees. Most everyone else did not. The folks handling what we'd call HR today likely didn't. The administrative assistants certainly didn't.
> The reason there are more college graduates today in the US is that the US labour market requires more college graduates than it did in the 60's. Partly because the available jobs today have higher requirements, and partly because of credential inflation.
The burning question is how much is jobs today having higher requirements, and how much is credential inflation? I don't think the U.S. economy is intrinsically more requiring of college degrees than it was in the 1960's, and it's possibly less necessary today. 30% of police officers today have college degrees. I can't find a figure for 1960 online, but I'd be floored if it was more than low single digits back then. Has the nature of policing changed? No. You still don't need a college degree to be a cop. Even things we think of as “white collar” jobs don’t (and historically didn’t) require a college degree. Every single paralegal I’ve met has a college degree. But it was historically, something that required only a certificate. The job hasn’t changed. But it’s harder to find smart people who didn’t go to college, so college gets required as a filter.
Look, you don’t need a bachelors degree to be a nurse (even an RN can qualify with an associates degree). Or a computer programmer. If those highly skilled jobs don’t require college degrees, then you don’t need half of everyone going to college.
That's as bold a claim as my opposite claim is, and your anecdotes offer about as much evidence for it as I did, i.e. none. I'll offer a counter-anecdote: I'm a better programmer for having gone to college, I've used the knowledge gained there, my value to the labour market is higher because of my education. I'm sure there are more people like me.
I would love to know what the truth really is though. I'm not disagreeing with you that there is a massive problem with credential inflation, it's absolutely huge, but I still think there's been a net gain in real demand for college education since the 60's, and that the US as a nation has benefited from it. Digging out the truth seems like an incredibly complex task though, and you have to use the educational system to do it, a system which would be incredibly biased against any findings that it itself is useless... So yeah.
Every single person? They guys manufacturing the rockets? Fueling them? Driving the lift? Manning the gantry?
If it is credential inflation, then is it providing value? Or as the grandparent said, is it just moving value around?
Are more jobs requiring college degrees because they are the most efficient way to increase productivity? Or is it because they are an easy filter, and more people have college degrees?
I think it's both. And as long as a college education is a net gain for the national labour market, it's in the national interest to support more of its population getting a college education. I mean, there are plenty of countries who has this as the entire rationale for their tuition-free universities where every single student gets a stipend regardless of what they study.
These countries usually rank pretty high in global competitiveness, which is some sort of measure of how far up the global value chain a country has moved, so there's at least a bunch of indicators that it's a pretty good rationale, that it's a pretty good idea to have an educated workforce.