High Ed inflation

Amusingly, the more educated Americans get the worse off we seem to be. In the modest 1950's-1970's, college was intended for the cognitive elite, who by default will never exceed more than a certain percentage of the population (WRT ethnic differences, in say Japan, people with an IQ of 105 usually won't be able to compete with the mental heavy hitters in their ethnic group, so you might as well relax and accept a career as a line-worker at Honda, rather than waste your time and money at building credentials in a (futile) attempt to compete with engineers, doctors, and lawyers. In a time of low status anxiety and quality leadership, everyone seems to understand this.

College ought to be reserved for those whose elite status comes easy (via high intelligence), rather than be a daycare for poor kids with middling IQs who were told that not going to college makes you a loser.  In point of fact, occupations which used to pay lower class (lower IQ) people well either no longer exist in this country (off-shoring, or foreigners doing this work on our shores), or pay such miserable wages that people feel as if they must try and go to college to "earn" a degree to enable them access to a better job. Said degrees are now effectively worthless for much of the population because they are now given out so indiscriminately, and by default things that are more common must lower in value.

The hard truth of the "service economy" is that jobs for low and average IQ people are now non-existent or have terrible wages, while more elite level IQ people have the smarts and social skills to make a living in occupations insulated from dumber people and/or foreign competition (such as Law and the Media). Lots of hapless lower IQ people are being given worthless diplomas for their futile attempt to compete with the cognitive elite, whose inherent advantages will never diminish, no matter how hard we try and promote STEM education for the intellectual lower and middle class.

GSS Variables: DEGREE, RACE(1), SEX(1)