Regarding history as a career, tenure track history professor jobs are much scarcer than the supply of history PhDs, but many gifted people love knowledge for its own sake. Weighing intellectual interests vs. financial prospects is hard and depends on one's values (which evolve over time).
Oh I COMPLETELY agree. It seems to me that there are two disastrous trends converging. On the one hand, we have anti-intellectualism which ridicules and treats with disdain anything that can not be packaged or sold. On the other hand we have a sense of privilege, which has led students and families to pressure high schools to provide high grades for inadequate (and sometimes plagarized) work. The end result is that we are sending to college, students who are probably plenty intelligent, but who are ill-prepared to actually study and work hard. I would imagine that it may be less a matter of grade inflation in colleges than it is a lowering of expectations--in response to large populations of students who treat colleges and universities as a purchased product (which should therefore adjust to meet the needs of the student/family consumers) rather than an institutions of learning.
