That requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions.

In 2017, Manjari Raman of the Harvard Business School wrote that “the degree gap—the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college degree—is significant. For example, in 2015, 67 percent of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.”

Once upon a time in another America, a high-school diploma was enough to snag you a good job, with a chance to move up as time went on (especially if you were white and male, as the majority of workers were in those days). And you paid no tuition whatsoever for that diploma. In fact, public education through 12th grade is still free, though its quality varies profoundly depending on who you are and where you live.

The real problem faced by today’s young people isn’t grade inflation. It’s degree inflation.

GRE

Colleges use student evaluations as a major metric for rehiring adjuncts and higher grades translate directly into better evaluations.

Nearly 25 percent of adjunct faculty members rely on public assistance, and 40 percent struggle to cover basic household expenses, according to a new report from the American Federation of Teachers. Nearly a third of the 3,000 adjuncts surveyed for the report earn less than $25,000 a year. That puts them below the federal poverty guideline for a family of four.

A 2014 congressional report revealed that 89 percent of us work at more than one institution and 27 percent at three different schools, just to cobble together the most meager of livings.

It’s true that most PhDs in science or engineering end up with postdoctoral positions (earning roughly $40,000 a year) or with tenure-track or tenured jobs in colleges and universities (averaging $60,000 annually to start). Better yet, most of them leave their graduate programs with little or no debt. The situation is far different if your degree wasn’t in STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) but, for example, in education or the humanities. As a start, far more of those degree-holders graduate owing money, often significant sums, and ever fewer end up teaching in tenure-track positions—in jobs, that is, with security, decent pay, and benefits.

In 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available, US colleges and universities churned out about 55,700 doctorates—and such numbers continue to increase by about 1 percent a year.

Airplane Games Sometime in the late 1980s, the Airplane Game roared through the San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community. It was a classic pyramid scheme, even if cleverly dressed up in language about women’s natural ability to generate abundance, just as we gestate children in our miraculous wombs. If the connection between feminism and airplanes was a little murky—well, we could always think of ourselves as modern-day Amelia Earharts. (As long as we didn’t think too hard about how she ended up.) A few women made a lot of money from it—enough, in the case of one friend of mine, for a down payment on a house. Inevitably, a lot more of us lost money, even as some like me stood on the sidelines sadly shaking our heads. There were four tiers on that “airplane”: a captain, two copilots, four crew, and eight passengers—15 in all to start. You paid $3,000 to get on at the back of the plane as a passenger, so the first captain (the original scammer), got out with $24,000—$3,000 from each passenger. The copilots and crew, who were in on the fix, paid nothing to join. When the first captain “parachuted out,” the game split in two, and each copilot became the captain of a new plane. They then pressured their four remaining passengers to recruit enough new women to fill each plane, so they could get their payday, and the two new copilots could each captain their own planes. Unless new people continued to get on at the back of each plane, there would be no payday for the earlier passengers, so the pressure to recruit ever more women into the game only grew. The original scammers ran through the game a couple of times, but inevitably the supply of gullible women willing to invest their savings ran out. By the time the game collapsed, hundreds of women had lost significant amounts of money. No one seemed to know the women who’d brought the game and all those “planes” to the Bay Area, but they had spun a winning story about endless abundance and the glories of women’s energy. After the game collapsed, they took off for another women’s community with their “earnings,” leaving behind a lot of sadder, poorer, and perhaps wiser San Francisco lesbians.

For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates.