Why does having a college degree no longer carry the same prestige as before? People don't have the same respect for the educated.
Last Updated: 26.06.2025 16:03
Back when my grandparents were kids, most people did not go to college. They graduated highschool and entered the workforce, and made a living. The people who went to college did so to become engineers, doctors, or lawyers. Educated men and women.
By my day, not going to college was weird. An aberration. But in order to deliver the product, a college degree, standards had to plummet. Because most people cannot earn a college degree of old. And the more normal college became, the less rigorous highschool and middleschool became, as a reaction. Many people graduate college today who are less well educated than highschool students of the 1950s. They are less literate, less well-read, less capable of critical thinking, and more easily indoctrinated.
It’s not that people don’t respect the educated. Frankly there has always been a longstanding trend of mocking the educated in humanity. The problem is that a college degree, as a general case, means nothing anymore, but people who have them often expect to be treated as having great minds like Issac Newton or Albert Einstein.
Worse, many jobs now demand college degrees for things that they have no business demanding. There is no reason someone should need a degree to be a mechanic. Frankly the old Guild model worked better. You should apprentice for a mechanic, learn a trade while earning a little money, and then earn a journeyman rating. Or however the details are sorted today. But the point is, going to college to get a degree to be a mechanic, a farmer, any of the trades really, is ridiculous. But as college degrees became the norm and the quality of education dropped at every level, it’s where we are now.
In my parents’ day, they got the idea that everyone should go to college because a college degree led to a better life. And when college graduates were doctors, lawyers, and engineers, who could demand high salaries, this was true.
This of course gets into the other issue with social problems like this. People like to point at a single issue and “fix” it, not recognizing that everything is an interconnected system with multiple feedback loops. The government kept sticking it’s dick in things, trying to fix problem X (and usually failing to do so), but causing problems Y and Z, then went and fucked those up too, and everyone faffed about blaming everything but the actual problems because real solutions are hard and many people just don’t think in systems. They can’t look seven steps up or down the chain of causality and see how the web is connected.
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I don’t know how to fix it, but in my opinion we should try to return to system where maybe 5–10% of people go to college to be those doctors and lawyers and engineers, and everyone else can get jobs that earn real money without drowning themselves in debt first. But there’s a lot of other things that need to get fixed too. Minimum wage laws, for instance, kneecap people right at the beginning. It’s the exact reason why what should be a starting job requires 15 years of experience. The law artificially inflates the cost of labor so the company needs to wring as much out of new employees as possible and is very risk-averse. On the other hand, if you can shake hands on Friday and start Monday, and be fired by Wednesday if you’re a useless fuck, and paid commensurately, companies will be willing to take on less qualified applicants because there’s less risk, and once proven workers, invest more in them. The idea of $15/hr for a starting wage is, to me, preposterous. I made $13.75/hr as an engineering intern. And I was the sole engineer at all in the US (I worked for a Swiss company). While we certainly need people to flip burgers and pour coffee, it’s not skilled labor, yet today it earns engineer’s wages.
But, rant aside, that’s why college degrees aren’t really valued anymore. Nor, to a large degree, should they be.
Because going to college not longer actually guarantees that someone is educated.
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My buddy used to work at a call-center, for Christ’s sake, that demanded a degree. Any degree. In anything. And despite actually having a degree in computer science, they didn’t let him actually troubleshoot anything. He had to read off the same fucking script as the kids with degrees in communications, gender studies, and underwater basket weaving.
Our parents thought sending all the kids to college was a great idea because it worked for them. But because everyone did that, the market got flooded with degreed individuals, and then bullshit makework degrees just to meet the demand for students that utterly failed to recognize that the market was already well over-saturated with useful degrees.
But the bottom line is that college, an actual, rigorous college, as college was originally meant to be, is simply not suitable for most people. Colleges are, or were, for the most part, for those of above-average intelligence.