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College degree? Psshhh...
By KBell in According to K
November 29, 2011

Better believe I clicked on this headline first thing Sunday morning: "The Dwindling Power of a College Degree."

The NYT article identifies reasons why having a college degree no longer guarantees someone a comfortable, middle-class existence.

Some reasons are obvious -- like jobs being outsourced overseas or replaced by technology. And true, some college degrees prepare students with skills not necessarily needed by the American economy.

As the article says, "Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value."

But this paragraph offers another explanation as to why a college degree may not have the clout it used to:

"Global trade and technology are significant trends, but they’re not laws and policies. The actual rules have also changed notably since the 1970s. Back then, there were all sorts of stabilizers that pushed working-class wages up and kept rich people’s wages lower. The minimum wage, at its pre-1970s peak, was almost 50 percent higher than it is now (inflation adjusted, naturally). Unions were stronger and had more government support. The United States taxed the rich much higher relative to the working class. (The top bracket was taxed at 70 percent in 1978; now it’s 35 percent.) It’s hard to imagine, but regulations largely limited the profitability of banks and kept bankers’ financial compensation low.

The new rules, combined with the other major changes, have effectively removed both the floor and the ceiling."

Sounds like a page straight out of the Occupy movement.

What do you think of that analysis?

What solutions do you suggest?