> high school educated people are increasingly useless to our economy. That seems like a silly statement. The jobs that most college graduates are fighting for

> high school educated people are increasingly useless to our economy. That seems like a silly statement. The jobs that most college graduates are fighting for were once, and often still are, done quite successfully by high school educated people. It is not that education matters in the workplace, it is just that the demand for those jobs has kept people trying to increasingly outdo everyone else in order to get the job. Education has been an easy way to do that. Education doubly serves as an easy filter. You have probably heard your parents say something like "in my day you only needed high school." That is because there were less high school graduates during that time. If you threw away the resumes without high school, you could pare them down to manageable levels. In the meantime there was a big push to see more high school educated people. Suddenly, filtering by high school yielded too many results. Degrees were still relatively rare, so applying that logic allowed the filter to work again. But then the big push for college education started... 53% of recent college graduates are underemployed or jobless[1]. This seems to indicate that having a bachelors is not even enough anymore. "Everyone" has a bachelors degree these days, so why hire one of them when you can hire someone who has a masters degree? The economy would do just fine if we had more high school (or less) educated people, but we would have to find some other filter, like gender, race, or religion and we have already decided that no company may filter based on those attributes. That leaves the infinite arms race of education where it is still socially acceptable to consider those without said education "stupid" and unfit to do the job. [1] http://blog.fora.tv/2012/04/the-new-53-unemployed-college-grads/ http://blog.fora.tv/2012/04/the-new-53-unemployed-college-gr...