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I watched that video yesterday. Thing is, there's nothing new in there for anyone who is paying close attention to the state of education in the west. There are entire high schools that don't put out a single literate graduate. There are hundreds of videos on the topic.

The university system was never intended for what it's being used for.

I'm working on a bit of a history for my next book, and all of this kind of goes back to the first world war and its immediate aftermath.

You see, after WW1, one of the problems is that you had militarily mobilized virtually every able-bodied fighting age man. And that's exactly where you saw a lot of the problems immediately after the first World war. We all know what ultimately happened in Germany, but in the United States they had an event called the bonus army, where all of the forgotten soldiers of World war I marched on Washington demanding benefits.

That's one of the reasons why you saw so much work done with respect to making sure that their opportunities for soldiers when they got home. They sent everyone to University, they made sure that there were houses for everyone, compared to the era before World war I, there was a step change in the size of government. Before World war I it was 3 to 5%, after World war I was close to 20%. Today it's around 30 to 50% with some countries being well over 50% such as Italy which is around 60%.

Before all that happened, University was just a fancy finishing school for the rich and powerful. That's the reason why it has the structure it does: a vocational school has no need to teach you English literature or philosophy, but a finishing school for the rich and powerful does. Universities effectively took on this roll because there was unbelievable amounts of money being poured into it, but never fully gave up on their previous purpose.

A couple things happened as a result of the elevation of the University. One is that because it was so universal companies felt that they could use it has a sorting mechanism. The post-war boom was never sustainable. Particularly in the United States, the country was basically untouched by the war, a whole bunch of it's prime working age men that just died, it had some of the only factories left on Earth and only farms left on Earth, and there were a bunch of infrastructure projects that could go in that would unlock previously unseen economic development. By the late 1960s that economic miracle was sputtering, and by the 1970s it was over. In a lot of ways the 1970s make the 2008 financial crisis and even the aftermath of the COVID pandemic look like nothing. Not to mention, women were starting to enter the workforce in larger numbers. Pair that with globalization, and companies didn't have a problem of not having enough people to do the jobs -- they had a problem of too many people applying for each job.

As that squeeze happened, the cargo cult started to form. They saw that the people who are most successful from the period immediately following the war to the end of the economic boom had higher levels of education, and so they foolishly began to try to increase the number of people who had graduated. At the beginning of my post I said that people who could not read were graduating from high school. This should not be possible. If you can't read you shouldn't be able to graduate from high school. They just kept on lowering the standards until you could though, because the numbers told them that a high school education makes you better off. Moreover, they wanted to get everyone into University because of the numbers showed them that people who graduated from University were better off. So you had standards falling, and the amount of money available rising. The standards falling I think had multiple effects. Yes it resulted in the students coming out being worse students, but it also meant that the individuals going through needed a lot more maintenance. Previously, if one of the Rich and powerful kids who came to University was unhappy, they were just drop out. After that, you couldn't have that because so much was increasingly on the line and so you needed to bring in all these new offices to micromanage. Same resources going to teachers, much more for bureaucracy.

It's a system always bound to fail.