I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick. Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive u

I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick. Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully. You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.