Peter Berkowitz has a proposal.

Unfortunately, with our current educational system, the problem starts long before students get to college.

[Mid-morning update]

Are we sending too many kids to college?

...the needless pressure to get educational credentials draws a large number of academically weak and intellectually disengaged students into college. All they want is the piece of paper that gets them past the screening. Most schools have quietly lowered their academic standards so that such students will stay happy and remain enrolled. Consequently, they seldom learn much — many employers complain that college graduates they hire can’t even write a coherent sentence — but most eventually get their degrees.

I think that this problem is related to the one above.

The universities could try the Kenneth Tomlinson approach: Hire review panels to cleanse the ranks of bias.

Prior to WW2 many more people had professional careers without college degrees. The postwar GI Bill created so many college graduates that employers could limit openings to those with degrees. Rand, this led to greater influence on society for academia and their politics.

Louise,
the other thing that killed climbing the corporate ladder sans degree was, "The Right Stuff". When NASA and the military at large decided the minimum education for success was a college degree, it was the death knell of the self made man.

I am by my own admittance an ex-high school drop out, I quit out of shear boredom. I got my GED to go into the Navy. Since then I've been in school over the years MORE than most of the people I know. I am a voracious reader and always have been. I've had over a thousand hours of specialized training for various jobs, and the certs that go with those training sessions. That's my educational background.

That being said, I agree with the college graduates not being able to construct a sentence. And most of the graduates I've worked with, never read a book, never read anything but the sports page, and think that degree is all the schooling they'll ever need in life. I worked in one company where two guys quit, rather than take an extension course all of the field personnel were required to take. It was paid time and the company paid for all incurred expense. How do you lose if somebody pays?

If nothing else, it seems to me that most of the college graduates I encounter now, don't know as much as high school kids did 20 or 30 years ago.

I disagree that we are sending too few students to college. Due to the size of our population, we graduate ten times less scientists and engieers as does China and India. That might not make a big difference in our relative national power immediately, but it means that 20 or 30 years down the road we won't even be in the technological race.

That is, unless their socialist governments do something stupid to punish their enterpreneurs even more than they already do.

PS. Since the enlightenment and the liberation of science and technology, the importance of a liberal education has been declining relative to the importance of a technical education. A society's ability to create and use tools and to understand math and physics are paramount in the modern age. Great works of art, not so much.

Aaron,
I read something recently arguing against the idea that the U.S. is really producing significantly fewer engineers than India and China. It seems that the word "engineer" is applied much more broadly over there than it is here. In those countries an auto mechanic or an electrician might be deemed an engineer.
I agree though about people not being able to write coherently. I used to be a safety engineer for NASA. Part of my job was to review mission specific flight rules to be sure that they conformed with Space Shuttle safety rules. More than once I rejected a flight rule with a comment to the effect of, "This collection of words does not constitute an English sentence and thus can not provide a safe guide to operations."

The UK government, some time ago under possibly its worst prime minister ever, had the bright idea of pushing for 50% of school leavers to go into higher education. (The reasons for this are debatable but probably include wanting to make the unemployment figures look better.)

Before this, we had a system that Americans may not like the look of, but nevertheless worked for us; the tuition fees were paid by government and each student got a grant, with the grant means-tested on parents' income. Now, tuition is still paid to some extent - although some courses cost extra - but the living allowance has disappeared. The reason for this is simple. When 10-15% of people went to university society could afford the earlier system - now it can't.

The results are predictable, given that at most 15% of people are capable of getting a decent college degree in a real academic subject. Enormous dropout rates - about 35% and climbing - and a proliferation of "Mickey Mouse" subjects such as media studies, together with a contraction in real, useful, hard subjects such as foreign languages and the sciences, to the extent that many universities are closing science departments.

In addition, there are a plethora of new "universities" that used to be called technical colleges, polytechnics etc. and have become universities by the simple esxpedient of changing their name. And many universities are having to spend the first 6 months on remedial basic maths and English courses, because the earlier parts of the system aren't doing their jobs properly. The grade inflation in A-levels is utterly relentless, with very many students getting 5 or 6 A and A* grades - and thus A grades are now worthless.

Of course, as part of all this, when going for a job in the civil service these know-nothing graduates are not distinguished from ones with a proper degree, either (to do so would admit the problem) - so bureaucrats become more stupid and useless than ever.

That's what happens when there is enough pressure for a college degree.

...the tuition fees were paid by government and each student got a grant, with the grant means-tested on parents' income...

You mean the tuition was paid by taxpayers in a socialist system. If you take five dollars out of my pocket, you're a thief. Why is it any different when the government takes five dollars out of my pocket?

Mac, Ok but irrelevant. The previous system was continued by a couple of generations (more or less) of elected governments - and I didn't have any say in it, even if my opinion among 30 million others counted for anything.

The point is that the drive towards more college degrees led inevitably to a cheapening of all college degrees. The number of people capable of making use of a real degree and of putting something back into society with it is no more than 15%. Insisting that 50% of the population get college degrees therefore means that 35% of the population have degrees not worth the paper to print them on; or, to put it another way, that two out of three degrees (roughly!) are such. Gross waste for which the bill will be paid - in fact it's being paid already.