Options for BA degrees: filing clerk or bagging grocery?

It has been a long time since I completely outsourced the materials for a blog post.  That is what I will do this time, because together they write a story themselves!  A story that I have, unfortunately, blogged about over and over :(

From the NY Times:

The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.

And, why so?

Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma — positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims adjusters — are increasingly requiring one, according to Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources, including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.
This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.

So, what purpose does a degree serve then?

When you get 800 résumés for every job ad, you need to weed them out somehow

Ok, how about a real, first-person, narrative?

I have a graduate degree, and I work two part-time jobs. One is teaching writing at a university; the other working at a supermarket. People don't believe me when I tell them I make more money per hour bagging groceries than I do lecturing on literary techniques.

So?

In this tight job market, we cannot afford to ignore the reality that a college degree is becoming a luxury: one that no longer translates directly to success. It is time we shed our stigmas towards "menial" workers. The irony is that their salaries – and accompanying lifestyles – are anything but.

If all these are true, can we at least feel good that students are doing something of value when in college?

If you have ever thought or told your students that you are teaching them "critical thinking," for example, you are banking on the prospect that students will abstract some general cognitive skill from your course and apply it to future courses or even life situations.
But in practice, as How Learning Works makes clear, "far transfer" turns out to be a much more complicated process than many of us might expect, or that I might imply in my blithely hopeful syllabus talk.
"Most research has found," the authors explain, "that (a) transfer occurs neither often nor automatically, and (b) the more dissimilar the learning and transfer contexts, the less likely successful transfer will occur. In other words, much as we would like them to, students often do not successfully apply relevant skills or knowledge in novel contexts."
In short, the further we move students away from the very specific context in which they have learned some information or skill, the less transfer we should expect to see.

So, then why are we doing what we are doing?