- As of the mid-1960s, only about 1/2 of adults had completed high school and about 1 in 13 had completed a college degree.
- By 1980, about 2 out of 3 adults had completed high school, and about 1 in 8 adults had completed a college degree.
- As of 1990, about 1 in 5 adults had completed a college degree and 4 out of 5 adults had completed high school.
- A few years from today, 1 out of 2 adults will have completed a college degree.
Another chart showing back to 1940
For the 2nd half of the 20th century, the U.S. out competed much of the world due to two things:
- The US did not suffer the physical damage of WW2, as faced by Europe, Russia and Japan. The US still had industrial capacity, including much left over from WW2 military goods manufacturing.
- An expanding educated class created a higher skilled work force.
At this point, adding more skilled workers has diminishing returns, plus the costs of college education are among the fastest rising prices of any good or service in the U.S. economy.
Here is an alternate view of educational attainment, from the U.S. Census:
Additional Thoughts
Many older workers had less education than their follow-on cohorts. Certainly, they learned much on the job through experience. However, we put more emphasis on certifiable training (degrees), and a faster pace of change in many industries meant that learned skills had a shorter useful lifespan.
Combined, this leads to many older workers being at a disadvantage compared to younger, better educated workers, who are trained on the latest technology and methods. Many older workers are experts on techniques that have been replaced and may not have opportunities to retrain on newer technologies.
Many older workers left the work force during Covid – some involuntarily via layoffs and furloughs, and some voluntarily because they did not wish to put themselves at perceived risks for Covid-19. Once the pandemic ran its course (most everyone has now had Covid and carries a degree of immunity), many have chosen not to re-enter the work force, or have been unable to re-enter the workforce. The latter because their skills are now dated and/or they are unable to find work that pays what they did before and do not see a return to the workforce as a good trade off. The US Chamber of Commerce has some additional background on this issue.
Additionally, some estimate that up to 240,000 previously working persons died due to Covid. That estimate is based on some broad assumptions, and I suspect it is at least 2x too high. Nevertheless, the overall effect is the labor participation rate has dropped, and a few million workers are now “missing” from the labor force. Combine that with the shortage of younger workers, especially teens and below, and below about age 30 – and we have a legitimate shortage of workers relative to the supply of labor in the past.
While teen workers may not seem important, this becomes a problem too. Not long ago, many teens started their work experience by working part time in fast food restaurants and retail. Today, due to both a reduced teen population and a lack of teens interested in this work, adults have been hired in their place – contributing to the shortage of adult workers in other areas.
When Everyone Has a College Degree, How do you Stand Out?
From a survey of a few hundred individuals on LinkedIn, it looks to me that if you are a high achiever who desires to move upwards – in many industries and many fields, you need to stand out from the crowd.
The most common ways to do that are
- Attend a “name” university. Literally a “top 50” university. This means a Stanford, a UCLA, a University of Ohio, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, University of Washington, etc.
- Pursue a graduate degree. Which degree you pursue depends upon field and type of work you do. This may be a terminal degree such as the MBA, or a PhD. Consider cross training with 2 Masters degrees.
- Study abroad and/or work abroad. Nearly 100% of the those whose background I checked, via LinkedIn or other online bios, had done study abroad programs and/or internship or work abroad early in their careers. Obviously, this varies by career field and most of those I looked at were in computer science, engineering or business/finance roles.
College education was a way for younger workers to stand out, during the past 50 years, hence the rising number of college graduates. Will this remain true into the future when there are fewer young, new workers? Hard to say. Society has a sense of inertia on this topic and it may be hard to change the expectation that academic certification outweighs on the job learning. On the other hand, in 2022, several airlines announced that a 4-year degree would no longer be required for airline pilot applicants who meet all other requirements. Several tech companies said they were now hiring “software boot camp” grads lacking a relevant college degree in software development. In that sense, the push for multiple college degrees may already be dropping.
