College was supposed to be hard. "was" is the operative word :(

If ever it is the case that a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste, well, now is the time to seriously rethink higher education here in the US.  And, what we do here will spread to the rest of the world too.  Not a single day passes without reading yet another piece that makes me wonder for how much longer this craziness in higher education can go on ...

Consider the following chart from Economix:

The chart easily tells the story, which is:

a higher share of college graduates under age 25 were employed in 2000 than in 2010 — 81 percent versus 74.4 percent. And a higher share of this demographic was employed in jobs that required college degrees a decade ago than last year — 59.7 percent versus 45.8 percent.

A phenomenally wasteful underemployment.  A kind of underemployment that is bound to have terrible implications for the rest of the graduates' lives.

But then one might contend that this is lowering education to nothing but utilitarian calculations.  But, hello, most students are in college only for those reasons.  If they could get going on a $30,000 job without the requirement of a college degree, I bet that the enrollment at my college will be down to a fifth or less.

As Loius Menand points out in his wonderful book-review essay in the New Yorker, it was not always like this:

A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive. ...
It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything?

Yes, are most students learning anything, more so given the expensive nature of the investment?

when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.
If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.
These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.

College is no longer supposed to be hard.  It is now an easy ponzi scheme.