As uppi points out, the kind of long-term strategic thinking that would dictate "Let's hire workers without degrees because they'll work for less and degrees are meaningless," is kind of discouraged by the short-term, profit-based thought that most corporations operate under anymore. As a student currently in public high school (my junior year), I promise you the profound illness and moral cancer that is American finance "corporate" culture has seeped down to every level of the education system. It is now the modus operandi of schools all the way down to the level of kindergarten to prepare children for employment, preferably in white collar finance or IT capacities. All education is being sussed out, to the most micro-managing degree possible, for usefulness in the context of employment. Math, the vaunted gateway to high-paying IT jobs, is taught with the intention of separating good students with potential for important degrees (engineering, etc) from bad students who will go on to be useless things in life, like authors, artists or -- shudder -- members of the government.
We are constantly being reminded that it is the job of our educators (never teachers, educators) to prepare us for employment. Actually learning anything is secondary to the goal of padding our resume, and we are continually ensured that resumes and perception of ability to provide for our employer, is the only thing that actually matters in our "career" as students. Please notice that I am emphasizing the continual use of business and finance language within the educational sphere.
North Carolina schools at least are being pumped full of teachers who do not actually know anything about the subject matter they are teaching, but rather have degrees from "education" schools, especially North Carolina State University which produces a large number of teachers (educators) with degrees in education and not the actual subject that they teach in the school. This is because it is considered the responsibility of the students to dig within themselves, and find their natural talent for the material, which is being offered only in the hope that they will be able to use their own natural skill to divine the subject matter in such a way that will make them palatable to employers. This is reinforced by the adoption of "Common Core" standards designed to place an even higher onus on students to grasp the material and make use of it themselves, rather than have it actually explained to them.
So what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
We are continually reminded that colleges also do not exist to actually teach us anything. Instead, colleges consider us an investment, and that investment can only be justified if they are producing students who are employable. If our high school transcripts do not demonstrate acceptable, marketable skills, colleges have no interest in us. This is exacerbated by the Teahadists currently in control of the state government, who are gleefully trying to defund and restructure the state's public colleges to make them more interesting to private sector employers.
Education is in the toilet in America and pretty soon we will return a world in which only the children of the extremely wealthy will be going to college. Rest in peace, the middle class.
