#2 is spot on. That is also why going to university no longer guarantees a "good job". A degree used to be a pretty decent proxy for intellectual talent. For ma

#2 is spot on. That is also why going to university no longer guarantees a "good job". A degree used to be a pretty decent proxy for intellectual talent. For many degrees, that was actually most of the value to potential employers, rather than the specific skills learned. You could get an English degree and get a job in an unrelated field not because your English education made you particularly valuable as an employee, but because the fact that you had made it through college was proof of the value that you had to begin with. But now, since more and more people are pushed towards college, the value of a degree as a proxy for talent has been debased. On top of that, there happens to be some correlation between the actual economic value of the skills taught in a degree and its power as a proxy for intellectual talent. For example, a degree in engineering teaches economically useful skills, and is also less accessible to those of middling intelligence. But a degree in English, on top of teaching skills of little economic utility, also lacks a strong filter for intelligence. So more of its value was in its role as a proxy, and it took a bigger hit to it. And that is why you see so many people with English degrees working as baristas. But the key point is that those are mostly people who would have been baristas anyway. The magical feather was fake; the employability, or lack thereof, was within them all along.