3 ms·
> On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate. This does not scale. Adding more college
by T-hawk 6y ago
> On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate.
This does not scale. Adding more college degrees does not make that many more productive jobs exist. It just moves the education bar higher for the jobs that do.
College degrees quadrupled since the 1960s. Productive jobs haven't. We already have an oversupply of degree holders working at Starbucks.
The stark reality is that the human race doesn't and can't have enough aggregate demand to productively employ everybody. The necessities of life - food, housing, medical - really only take about 10% of the population to produce and supply. Maybe another 20% in productivity-adjacent areas like finance and government services and other administration. Everything else is leisure and service economy, and there isn't infinite demand for that.
- kazinator 6y agoIndeed, it's just a correlation: if we sort people by how much they earn, of course university degrees will be more prevalent in the high end than in the low end. It could be that degrees cause more income, or that more income causes degrees, or that there is a common cause: people from a more well-to-do social backgrounds tend to get degrees.