Future of higher education?

Azzie Trembly: Probably. Did you know that prior to WWII most Americans didn't even go to high school. They finished up some time around 8th or 9th grade if that far. Go back even further and hardly anyone had a HS diploma because schools were few and far between at that level and people had to work the farm. This was the pre-1930'ish period before the educational activists decided that everyone needed a compulsory education.Before there was an absolute "if you don't graduate from HS you won't get a job", we had a world where only about 30% of the population had a HS diploma and those 70% of other people managed to survive and have a job and a family. (this peeked about 1955) By the late 60's credential creep created a world with a pretty high HS graduation rate. By 1980 the idea was firmly set that a HS education is the basic level and anything less was substandard. HS graduation rates at that point exceeded 80% which we can call "almost everyone".The result then ! was that to get ahead of the competition one had to go to college. Jobs that could be had in 1960 with just a HS diploma would require a college degree by 1980. And so the next level creep up (the one you see now) began.Presently we see that about 50% of all HS grads go to college and about 1/3 of the whole population has a bachelor's degree. But, only 25% of all jobs require a bachelor's degree. That means there will be some people working in "underemployment" conditions. In order to compete for the jobs that need a bachelor's degree - these folks will get a master's.As the percentage of people with a master's degree increases (presently about 10%) toward 25% of the population, those jobs that formerly required only a bachelor's degree will be filled by these master's holders. When that extreme is exceeded, it will be PhD's required to compete.At some point, there will probably be a crash. It may actually come fairly soon because the present generation of college st! udents and the recent grads are starting to ask the question "! is it really worth it" and they aren't always coming up with an affirmative answer. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, etc. will always need the higher education. The question is, how long we can continue to advise that "everyone needs to go to college" and still expect that level of education to have any workforce value?We can see some twenty to twenty-five year patterns here so it's easy to predict then that the point where a graduate degree begins to equal the Camelot Period high school diploma is now. In 1950 about 10% of the US population had a bachelor's degree. In 2011 about 10% of the US population has a master's or more.Keep in mind though that "successful" isn't always defined by how much money you earn or by having more education that everyone else....Show more