There are many villains in the story of the student debt bubble. The universities that charge exorbitant tuition rates simply because they can, bilking working families out of thousands of dollars for an education that isn’t worth a fraction of the cost, should be the first in line to absorb the blame. But it is a long line indeed. The government has earned a hefty portion of our collective scorn for issuing predatory loans to kids fresh out of high school with no assets or income. And blame goes to the public school system for indiscriminately pushing students into college, and to parents who add to the pressure, which I’m convinced is as much about their own vanity as it is their concern for their child’s financial future. We can thank all of these people for $1.5 trillion in student debt.
But there’s another group that seems to have largely escaped the public’s wrath, despite their unique role in driving this entirely unnecessary crisis. We take it for granted that our kids “need” to obtain a college degree because so many jobs require them, but the need is mostly artificial. Thousands of employers across the country have chosen to arbitrarily inflate their job requirements, often demanding that applicants have degrees for positions that don’t actually necessitate them. And it’s only getting worse. Positions that didn’t require any degree 20 years ago now require a bachelor’s, and positions that required a bachelors 20 years ago now require a master’s. This, again, is artificial. People without degrees could perform the tasks necessary for most of these positions but employers disqualify them from consideration right out of the gate, for no good reason.
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