That may be true for many (most?) students who drive up phenomenal amounts of debt to earn degrees in fields of questionable value. For those who are handsomely paid to deliver those degrees, not so much. In fact, some highly intelligent people have learned it's easier to peddle snake oil to naive young minds than to earn a living the old fashioned way.
I don't mean to insult all knowledge peddlers and administrators in the education market. There are some outstanding teachers out there who disperse information of real economic value. Unfortunately, there's no shortage of others delivering pablum like it was manna from Heaven. Even worse, there are the far more numerous education bureaucrats hanging onto the system for all it's worth.
Plus, it only follows that after you've been snookered out of a lot of money for a piece of paper in a field that doesn't really need it, you tend to demand that same paper from anyone else who wants a job. You're not likely to let someone get a “free” ride when you had to pay your dues, so to speak.
I see jobs that require college degrees all the time, but many could be easily performed by high school graduates after a bit of on the job training. The degree is simply a ticket, in some cases, to getting your foot in the door.
When the SHTF, a lot of people are going to be in sorry shape. Unless one can eat 8 1/2” x 11”, it might be far better to know a trade, like plumbing or farming.
“I see jobs that require college degrees all the time, but many could be easily performed by high school graduates after a bit of on the job training. The degree is simply a ticket, in some cases, to getting your foot in the door.”
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You are speaking of TODAY’S high school graduates, consider that college graduates of today don’t even have what used to be a high school education and the fact is that many college graduates now are working at the sort of job that would have been done fifty years ago by high school dropouts. I am not exaggerating, there used to be a lot of supervisors in manufacturing plants who had not finished high school, some of them advanced much farther than that. Now it is common to see “college graduates only” in ads for the sort of jobs that no college graduate would have considered taking in 1960. It was quite common then to see young men who had a high school diploma married and supporting children by the age of 22. In fact I was considered rather strange when I was still single at 23! By the time I finally married two days after my 28th birthday it was a shock to many who had long since decided that I would never marry!