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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The US dug themselves into a hole in the 70s when they disallowed bankruptcies on school loans.

That opened up a flood of money to 18 year olds going to college, which in turn led to the colleges massively expanding their offerings.

Colleges in the US don't just educate. They are also the minor league sports programs for most sports in the US, and they provide luxury benefits like gyms and movie theaters and so on.

They can't go back now. They can't just stop doing all the sports with all the fancy equipment they bought, they can't just get rid of all the luxury housing and movie theaters and so on.

So yes, the US is pretty unique in this respect.

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I think the US also did some strange things like giving GIs free tuition (not necessarily a bad thing) then artificially supporting those GIs by requiring a college degree as gatekeeping for bureaucratic jobs. If you look around places where there's lots of bureaucracy (like washington dc) there's tons of strange billboards and the like on public transit advertising graduate school (MA and PhD) targeted at beaurocrats that need to check off that box for a pay/rank/retirement increase. IIRC one of them was called "Graduate School", as in you would go to a graduate school called "Graduate School".

In any case not-in-DC it's more focussed on the BA segment of the population, but artificial gatekeepering is a thing (even in tech! I know many candidates that I wanted to hire but were turned down because they didn't have a BA in CS)

Credentials are used as a lazy proxy for ability in any number of large organizations all over the world.

Anecdotally, I think its worse in the public sector. I know several public school teachers who have gotten graduate degrees for the sole purpose of getting a raise. Its not like a private company where you can get a bigger raise by impressing your boss.

Most school districts have what’s known as a “step and lane” salary schedule for teachers. These grids specify how much raises are worth. Teachers earn a “step” increase for each additional year of experience, with many teachers peaking with the highest “step” at around age 55.

Teachers can also earn more by having more education (those are the “lane” increases). Some districts pay teachers holding a master’s or doctoral degree a premium, while others move teachers into a higher pay column when they earn a certain number of credit hours of professional development.

https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/teacher-pay/index.html

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