> - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of uni

> - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees. I know enacting social change is much much harder than throwing money at problems, but I wish America figured out a way to really strengthen the cultural admiration for the hard-working craftsperson archetype. Pete Buttigieg took a lot of flak for pointing out that many jobs in America don't require a college degree, and there should be nothing shameful about learning a skilled trade instead of going to college. We have a vast over-supply of many college majors, and (I'm told) big shortages in many skilled trades. There are way too many people with 4-year degrees from top-100 schools working cash registers in retail, when they'd have far less debt and higher income (and a good chance of later becoming successful small business owners) if they'd gone to trade school instead of college. It's honestly classist to push 4-year degrees so hard. There's something noble about optimizing your own happiness while providing valuable services, despite much of America considering skilled laborers to be a class below cashier workers with useless 4-year degrees. I wish we as a society could better appreciate skilled laborers. We don't have much positive to show from decades of flooding the college tuition markets with cheap credit / crippling debt and implicitly pushing hard the notion that going to trade school is settling for second-best. There's something to be said about removing the crippling personal debt from the act of flooding the education markets with money, but without cultural changes, I think a big effect would be further ballooning of college costs. I fear the crippling debt will just get hidden as accelerating the ballooning of government debt without moving the needle much on inequality.