Comment by atomicnumber3
20 days ago
It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids.
For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class.
I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
I don't know why americans have this strange idea, but the first university in italy was created to learn law, which lead to a very well remunerated job.
So it's in no way a new thing.
It’s not entirely new (especially for the professional class like lawyers), but as the poster indicated, it’s relatively new for the middle class
>vaguely recently
I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.