Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas). Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a lot. As for college... It was a

Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas). Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a lot. As for college... It was a differentiator, not an equalizer. When so many people have college degrees, they're just an expectation and all of a sudden you raised the bar, so people who don't have them are even more screwed. The analogy I always like is MMORPG expansions/level cap raise. Every time the level cap raises, new players to the game take that much longer to catch up. The developers then need to add a bunch of "catch up" mechanics to artificially close the gap.