Cargo Cut University

Hey, Wheetabix started blogging and didn't tell me.  He has a great post up about the return on investment from college:

Economics 101 discusses supply and demand.  The more you have of something, the less valuable it is.  Think how much you value packing peanuts and plastic grocery bags.  In my 20's, everyone had a high school degree.  The only people who ever wanted proof were the people in the admissions offices of the colleges I applied to.  It had almost no value to anyone else.  The same thing has now happened to college degrees.

High school teachers began to value education over the ability to make a living.  Colleges had a vested interest in increasing attendance.  Government got into the lucrative student loan game.  And education became a product instead of a path.  "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" sounds inspirational, but "be cool, stay in school" is more honest.  What it means now is "we won't let you work, and we have to store you somewhere."

Pretty smart there about more of something drives down its cost.  The only thing I would add is that there is more than  little whiff of cargo cult thinking here - in the 1960s and 1970s college graduates generally made good money.  So let's make more college grads out of whatever is at hand.  The cargo cuts  wanted the GIs to come back with all their stuff so they made GI stuff out of whatever was at hand.

Oh well, I'm sure this will work out fine for the colleges when they just tune their bamboo radios to the right frequency ...