"Surely people should strive to be as educated as they can or want to be." No one will argue that, all else being equal, more education is better. Education's

"Surely people should strive to be as educated as they can or want to be." No one will argue that, all else being equal, more education is better. Education's nice. So are lots of other things that people want from life, e.g. leisure, money, exercise, real-world job experience, entertainment, participation in the arts, family time, spirituality, world travel, what-have-you. But we make trade-offs in life, and getting a big fat expensive degree and making very little use of it is quite possibly too much "education" at the cost of "money" and other valuable things. It's perfectly meaningful to consider that "overeducation".