[kevbin]

"College is unquestionably more rigorous today." This is likely true at the high-end. But the vast majority of college students are not at the high-end. At the mean, universities have to mop-up after a dysfunctional K-12 establishment based on self-esteem and social-promotion. Remedial reading, writing, and mathematics are common at second- and third-tier universities. The scope of "special needs" has been broadened to include customers who are incapable of producing college-level coursework.

To ensure that students who elect to pursue a rigorous education are not penalized relative to those who do not so choose, grades at those institutions have been inflated to meaningless extent.

The educational industrial complex is geared toward growth. Effectively serving that market requires lower baseline standards and less meaningful quality metrics within the serviced population. Certainly the market is consuming more educational product than in the early 60s, but whether this produces a better educated populace is less obvious--unless "better educated" is defined to mean "consumed more educational product."

~

"in the early 60s there was a massive gender gap in college attendance" As an aside, today's gender gap is the opposite: colleges attract fewer males than females. If you consider graduation and 4-year graduation rates, the gap is greater and growing faster. I don't know that this marketing failure says anything about the quality of education though.

[bkovitz]

Someone tell me if this is right (it's just guesswork):

Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition: the culture of educated people. The purpose of vocational schools was practical job training, nothing more.

Attending "college" was more prestigious, but also of little interest to most people. (Most people are basically practical.) Social initiatives to bring poorer people into the educated world put money into colleges, not vocational schools. But most people don't want to learn about Keats and the Magna Carta and that sort of thing, they just want to get skills to do a job to make more money than they could without those skills.

Over time, the purpose of colleges became confused. People today see colleges as intended to provide job training, and just doing a lousy job of it. Colleges, with their state funding, grabbed much of the market from vocational schools, killing off most of them.

So today, we have many colleges, with vast numbers of students. Most of the students mostly jump through useless bureaucratic hoops for four or five years, don't learn the things educated people know, and don't get job skills, either.

[willchang]

I've always thought this way too. The fact that car mechanics make more than programmers points to the fact that there is actually a dearth of education leading up to being a capable mechanic, and perhaps a surfeit of education leading up to being a mediocre programmer. The fact that manufacturing has been shedding jobs for decades makes it even weirder that competence in the manual trades is so expensive to hire. Perhaps America has never provided decent educational support for the trades, and for a long time, the average manufacturing job required little. I wonder how different the nation would be if this education had been available all along.

[kevbin]

According to the BLS* Computer Programmers (15-1021) average $73,000/yr. Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics(49-3023) average $37,540/yr, or roughly half what programmers make.

* http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm

[krschultz]

Yes, but in the past it wasn't like only great students went to college. My Dad's sole motivation for college was escaping the Vietnam draft. There were many like him. In fact the college he attended went out of business because it was so bad and so few students wanted to go there.