Impressionable students believe they can go to college, do little to no work actually comprehending the material they’re going to be using in their field of choice, and then go all “shocked pikachu” when they graduate and are unemployable.
It’s not a college problem. It’s a student problem. They believe just because they have a degree that they’re entitled to high paying jobs when a degree isn’t that special anymore.
Yeah it could be that expectations have gotten lazy. It was always the case that you get out what you put in, so if people are coasting more, then outcomes probably reflect that.
The Fed’s paper does say that the income premium for college degree remains relatively robust, as it always has. The part that they call out as changing over time is the relative savings the college educated have by the time they retire. They don’t know why though, and spending and savings habits might be changing, so the wealth premium going down might not indicate that college is less special.