[sb057]

From a layman's perspective, it seems like it's mostly an expected outcome of college degrees becoming a class signifier. In 1990, only a fifth of American adults had bachelor's degrees, with those who held them making 70% more than high school graduates. A sizeable gap, sure, but those non-college graduates have minimum wage retail workers and general laborers, and union steel and auto workers in the same educational bucket.

By 2020, it had risen to well over a third of Americans who had bachelor's, and 105% more income for those with them. One might expect a dilution in a degree's value, but I think it's just a matter of minimum wage workers still being high school graduates, whereas virtually all professional workers (including the increasingly few manufacturing workers) needing a bachelor's to get past the first stage of HR.

[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

[ajross]

I don't follow? If the population of college educated adults is growing, it's by definition becoming less selective and would be expected to show less skew. College educated people used to be a "special" demographic, now they're much closer to the rest of society. But the data shows the opposite effect, with the lifespan benefit of a degree more than doubling.

[asdff]

I think there is something to be said about provenance of the degree. For example there's been quite a lot of expansion in number of colleges or even community colleges expanding their systems while actual prestigious colleges themselves have only expanded so much.

Here are the stats for Harvard enrollment of undergrads (1,3), along with US population (2,4) and percent Harvard student (not sure where I get number of people in the workforce with harvard degrees data but maybe this is a decent proxy):

Year - ugrads - US population - % of US pop at harvard

1990 - 22,851 - 248,709,873 - 0.0092%

2000 - 24,279 - 281,421,906 - 0.0086%

2010 - 27,594 - 308,745,538 - 0.0089%

2025 - 24,519 - 343,000,000 - 0.0071%

1. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_312.20.a...

2. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...

3. https://www.harvard.edu/about/

4. https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[kelipso]

Let me just write this down… Just for illustration, assume average lifespan of poor person is 60 and average lifespan of rich person is 80, 30% of the population is from the rich person group and rest from the poor person group, and these two facts hold for current time and the 90s.

Let’s say currently, every rich person goes to college, so college to non-college lifespan is 80:60.

While in the 90s, let’s say 20% goes to college and every college going person is rich. Then the lifespan of college going person would still be 80 and non-college going person would be more than 60.

So, another way of looking at it is that the non-college going population is getting to be the special demographic whose statistics are getting skewed, though I’m not sure that’s the correct way of looking at it.

[rayiner]

It might be a skewed distribution where life expectancy drops off rapidly below the median but isn’t that different at the top. So it’s not a big difference when it’s the bottom 90% and the top 10%, but it is when it’s the bottom 60% versus the top 40%.

[asdff]

10% increase is a lot lower than I anticipated what with all the talk about a B.S. being the barrier for entry these days.

[foundddit]

Apparently nearly half of college students drop out. [1] That gives us most people going to college, but a significant portion not graduating.

[1] https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates

[tobyjsullivan]

20% to 33% is not a 10% increase, if that’s what you’re referring to. That’s a 65% increase.