If college education is largely about signaling, as Bryan Caplan (the interviewee below and author of the recent book, "The Case Against Education") suggests, sending more people to college does not achieve much social good, and subsidies for higher education should be reduced.

School Is Expensive. Is It Worth It?
By James Taranto
Wall Street Journal
April 14, 2018
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What does the sheepskin signal? His answer is threefold: intelligence, work ethic and conformity. “Finishing a philosophy degree from Princeton—most people are not smart enough to do that,” he says. At the same time, “you could be very smart and still fail philosophy at Princeton, because you don’t put in the time and effort to go and pass your classes.”

As for conformity, Mr. Caplan puts the signal into words: “I understand what society expects of me. I’m willing to do it; I’m not going to complain about it; I’m just going to comply. I’m not going to sit around saying, ‘Why do we have to do this stuff? Can’t we do it some other way? I don’t feel like it!’ ” It’s easy to gainsay the value of conformity, a trait the spectacularly successful often lack. Think Mark Zuckerberg. But then imagine how he would have fared as a 21-year-old college dropout applying for an entry-level corporate job.

Mr. Caplan believes these signals are reliable, that college graduates generally do make better employees than nongraduates. Thus it is rational for employers to favor them, and for young people to go through school. Yet the system as a whole is dysfunctional, he argues, because the signaling game is zero-sum. He illustrates the point with another analogy: If everyone at a concert is sitting, and you want to see better, you can stand up. “But if everyone stands up, everyone does not see better.”

The advantage of having a credential, that is, comes at the expense of those who lack it, pushing them to pursue it simply to keep up. The result is “credential inflation.” Today a college degree is a prerequisite for jobs that didn’t previously require one—secretary, rental-car clerk, high-end waiter. And to return to the concert analogy, if you’re unable to stand, you’re objectively worse off than before. “People who are in the bottom 25% of math scores—their odds of finishing college, if they start, are usually like 5% or 10%,” Mr. Caplan says. They end up saddled with debt and shut out of jobs they may be perfectly capable of performing.

Signals weaken as they become widely diffused. Mr. Caplan says studies that track how students spend their time confirm the suspicion that higher education isn’t as rigorous as it once was. “In the mid-’60s, a typical college student would be spending 40 hours a week on academic stuff—classes plus studying. And now, it’s about one-third less,” he says. “College is kind of a party now.” A college degree doesn’t signal the same intensity of work ethic as it did then, but because of the zero-sum nature of signaling, those without degrees look lazier than before.

Originally Posted by Dude
Long dead are the days where a plucky youth could work all summer at a minimum-wage job and save enough money for the next 9 months of college tuition.

Today, food insecurity and homelessness among college students is on the rise, and has moved into the middle class: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...pread-among-college-students-study-finds

How we can expect to remain competitive in the global marketplace with these kinds of artificial barriers to success is beyond me.