While more people than ever have college degrees, productivity has slowed to half of what it once was, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Throughout the history of this country, increased access to education has ultimately translated into increases in economic productivity, sometimes dramatically. The Journal noted that, between 1910 and 2000, the share of Americans with high school degrees went from 14 percent to 84 percent and the share of those with a bachelor's degree went from 3 percent to 26 percent.  In 2019, nearly two decades later, 94 percent of Americans have a high school education and 39 percent have completed a four-year degree. Despite this increase, productivity of nonfarm businesses rose by an average of 1.4 percent a year, compared to 2.3 percent a year from 1947 to 2000. This is to say nothing of the dramatic jumps in the country's development from the beginning of the century to 1947.

The Journal notes that the earnings premium that comes with a college degree remains in play (although other studies have found this premium is slowly shrinking). Yet Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist interviewed by the Journal, believes that the diminishment in productivity is at least in part due to the quality of the educational institutions that people are choosing, particularly for-profit colleges outside the traditional four-year degree system. Another theory, offered by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, is that people generally don't pick up skills in college that are relevant to their employer; the degree, according to this theory, is more of a heuristic that a candidate will be a productive worker, one which is becoming less useful as more people get degrees.

This latter theory has been mirrored in a 2017 survey of employers which most employers view college degrees as more of a screening tool to winnow down the pool of applicants than as something needed for the actual job. For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job. The question, then, is not so much "What did you learn in college?" but "Are you bright and hardworking?" To these 60 percent of employers, a diploma means the answer to that question is "yes." One reason why employers might hold this view, according to an article in Inside Higher Education, is that a college degree generally has generally stood as a key class marker; the importance of social class in hiring decisions has been borne out by research described in the Harvard Business Review, as well as a recent a study from Yale.