Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market (Ep. 160) | Conversations with Tyler:

in 1983, with the nation at risk, we suddenly decided, “Oh, point of high school is for everyone to go to college.” No one had told high schools up until that point. Now that that’s the case, the basic problem is, if you keep the number of college seats constant, and you demand that everybody try to go to college — and in fact, if businesses, to some extent, weaponize college degrees by saying, “Oh, if you don’t have a college degree, you can’t get into a decent job” — well then, suddenly you’ve got a huge demand for college degrees, and you’ve got basically mostly fixed supply.

*This was a wonderful podcast episode. Worth a listen. Link nearby should be to the transcript page. Should be able to find link or player to listen there too.