Well, I agree with much of what you wrote, but the above I don’t agree with, one bit.
Most jobs don’t need much more education than they did 40 years ago.(*)
My job — computer programming — is far easier than it was 40 years ago, when I first started writing computer programs for money. A lot of programmers never even go to school — Google and other large companies routinely hire them, if they show a record of excellence.
I do now in a day what I would have done in a month in 1980, and with a lot less stress too.
It’s not just that the typical programmer’s velocity is something like two orders of magnitude greater than it was back then, due to far more luxurious tooling, but also our error rate is almost a full order of magnitude less, again thanks to such tools as unit tests, continuous integration and the like. And, of course, being able to search all the world’s information.
This is true for almost every job. Just to be a cashier in a store in 1980 meant having to know the price of everything in the store. Now the machine does that work for you. You don’t even have to make change.
And jobs with specific technical needs require on-the-job training, not education. Look at Germany — vocational training there is done on the job, by their labor unions. Only the engineers need post-secondary education — as they always have.
In the rest of the world, and in America before about 1990, higher education was not seen as primarily vocational training, but a way to become a better human being and a better citizen.
People here in Europe where I now live go to university for something “useless” like philosophy, not because they think they will get a job with it, but because they as a human being always cared about these questions and wanted to delve into this area in depth.
(* — I wanted to add this — in a very real way, a lot of people’s are much harder now for them, but in a very different way. You don’t need more education today for most jobs, but jobs are harder for other reasons — because our security is gone, because we have to work longer and more unusual hours, because many of are working juggling multiple marginal jobs just to survive…)
