College became the default – Let's rethink that
The argument that &quot;most kids don&#x27;t need to go to college&quot; is the same argument that British intellectuals were making at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, except replace &quot;college&quot; with &quot;high school.&quot; The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time. So &quot;most kids don&#x27;t need to go to college&quot; seems historically shortsighted.<p>That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we&#x27;re spending on tertiary education  is actually <i>well-spent</i>. For one, it&#x27;s <i>incredibly</i> unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.<p>I don&#x27;t think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate <i>more</i> people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.<p>Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, <i>Capital and Ideology</i>, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I&#x27;m not saying two world wars didn&#x27;t contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.