I could agree w/that if employers would stop requiring 4 year degrees for entry level jobs that could be done w/2 yrs of community college.
In the big cities I've lived in, it's hard to get a office job w/o a degree, even if you are answering phones and photocopying. It creates an artificial market for graduate degrees because people have to get a masters just to differentiate themselves from the crowd and have promotion opportunities. You wind up w/jobs advertised for people w/grad degrees that a 4 year grad could do.
I worked in a call center once where well over half of the gals on the telephone had a BA....sad, but true
The problem is anyone under 30 without a 4 year degree is considered marginal. Older people can still get away without a 4 year degree, at least for now....
This does tend to de-value education, but when you look at the product of most public high schools, it is not suprising that employers don't take the HS graduates seriously anymore.
Tech schools and Junior colleges should be better respected, but for some reason we denigrate the benefits of these very sensible institutions.
Then we end up with an army of marketing majors, cat therapist, Interior designers, historians (ahem!) and lawyers.
What we are going to end up with is a quarter of the country that is over-educated and under paid, but living in relative comfort doing essentially silly jobs, ....while three quarters of the nation exist in a precarious state desperately competing for an ever shrinking pool of domestic manufacturing jobs....or competing with "immigrants" ...hehe
it's an odd situation, but nothing we can't deal with
As for me, I'm a proud poor Ph.D candidate who knows full well I'll never be rich and famous teaching history.
And since I happen to like America, I'm relatively unemployable at most public universities.
But it's ok,
People should live their lives and do what they want to do.
If money was your only motivating factor, you'd be a prostitute or drug dealer......
Likewise, a high school diploma used to mean more...
Your point is especially right in certain states that require accreditations to hire. New York, California, and New Jersey are propbaly the worst for this. They use "qualification" as a guise for political compliance, under threat of audit/fines/liability and probably even jail.