The year I applied to the Stanford graduate school they had 7000 applicants for 1000 admissions. The Dean of Admissions had to say no to 6 students for every one that he said yes to. What a job that must have been.
Yes.
People seem willing to denigrate a college education, but there are certain professions that just cannot be accommodated by trade schools or OJT.
Just cannot be done.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t people out there who could do nearly anything, because some people are just brilliant. But that isn’t something you can bank on.
I will say, though, that may be one of the reasons things are in such a dire way, because the quality of an education is being diluted not because people are stupider, which I don’t think is any truer today than it might have been 100 years ago, but because the people designing the educational process today value education far less than virtue signalling.