Prior to WW II 5% of the population went to college. Medicine, dentistry and engineering were single degree professions. Liberal arts, which used to mean science, math, history and literature, was the province of the sons of families with substantial means.
The GI Bill was a brilliant response to what to do with several million young men who had just returned from the war and who would cause significant trouble if not occupied in some constructive fashion.
But education as a whole has become a complete scam. I was asked to serve on the geoscience department external advisory board where I got my BA and MS. In 3 years of trying I was never able to get any response from faculty members to my inquiries about what level of mathematics was being taught to the GIS students and what was needed. Having been heavily involved in geodetic software during my working career, I'm acutely aware of a *lot* of issues to the point that I think that *all* computer generating mapping is a specialist task. I've seen far too many major errors. I can't identify a well drilled in the wrong location, but I'm sure plenty have been. In the end I concluded that my appointment to the board was intended to separate me from my money and nothing else. They did not and will not get a nickel. The library is moving almost 700,000 books to a remote location to give kids more space to hang out in the library.
I did not get my PhD at Austin. After 4 years I lost my financial support and so I went back to work as I could not justify losing another 6 years of income starting over at Stanford. But I *did* get what mattered. I acquired the ability to teach myself anything, which, despite being an autodidact, was not a skill I possessed when I finished my MS which was the required professional degree in geology going back even before WW II.
I have though long and hard about education for the sciences and engineering. In my opinion, the level of mathematical preparation required now makes an MS essential if one is to be more than a technician. The PhD is nice if you have the motivation, but there are not a lot of jobs at that level. Science magazine had an editorial which highlighted that only 5-6% of PhDs found permanent employment in academia.
My biggest complaint is the denigration of the skilled trades. You need almost 4 years of education to understand the systems in a modern automobile.
Bill Fisher is famous for saying the best place to find oil is where you've found it. The West Texas Permian basin which was the hot play after WW II and where G.H.W. Bush made his money is going gangbusters right now because of the degree to which horizontal drilling has been developed. The strain on local infrastructure is so great the operating companies have pledged $100 million to local government to hire teachers, repair roads and all the other things needed.
The calculus was invented about the time my ancestors came to the New England area. But it was almost 300 years before it became a routine engineering tool. Globalization has made us all highly interdependent. At one time I thought this was good. Now I realize is that it has made civilization a house of cards.
I don't know when it will collapse, but I know it will at some point. During the last 200 years we have so successfully and ruthlessly consumed natural resources as to make me weep. But the physical world cannot support exponential growth for very long.
Technology and civil order go hand in hand. You cannot have technology above the level of 1800 without a social framework which makes trade possible. Up until the early part of the 20th century most of the population was engaged in agriculture at barely above subsistence level and worked from dawn to dusk. But even at 1800 level technology very few were independent of the chapman, the traveling salesman with his wagon of things people could not make for themselves.
Ultimately humans will become extinct just as every species eventually does. But technology will go extinct long before that.
Jared Diamond in one of his excellent books cites the case of the Chatham Islanders. During the Pleistocene low stand when sea level was about 600 ft lower than it is today, the Chatham Islands were connected to Australia. After the rising water cut them off the inhabitants regressed technologically and lost knowledge of the needle, fish hook and other simple things. They lived in small bands of hunter gatherers of less than two dozen and were not sufficiently productive to support technical specialists.
