Subject: Re: future elections
Be fair, albaby. I just checked. A full 96% of Congress have college degrees. It's not just Dems.

Absolutely - federal electeds are almost entirely college-educated.

But up and down the party, there's plenty of other leadership. Other electeds (state Reps and Senators and cabinet folks), various party chairmen and staffers, county and local leaders, even down the folks who hold grass roots leadership roles. Political parties are enormous organizations - actually interlocking networks of affiliated organizations. The Democrats have increasingly become the home of the college-educated, both in terms of voters (college voters make up an enormously larger share of the Democratic base than a few decades ago) and the people who make and shape the party's priorities.

My contention is that off-shoring was/is causing a drain on "good middle class jobs", and now automation is draining more.**

Certainly true - but not entirely relevant to this point. A huge number of "good middle class jobs" that get offshored are also jobs that would are gated behind a degree. Some of the largest categories are accounting, marketing, and IT. Current trends in automation are also coming for jobs that are degree jobs - look for a lot of computer science majors to find it harder to get jobs as AI swallows coding. Meanwhile, plenty of jobs that are getting "artificially" gated behind degrees (like one of the largest categories, general and operations managers) remain onshore - but are unnecessarily hard for non-college grads to get.

There's certainly no easy answers. But I'm not sure getting more people into college - on the whole - is one of them. We're already at the point where more than 60% of people in the U.S. have obtained some college credit; and about half the population has obtained at least an associates degree. Meanwhile, by definition, half of the college-age population will be below-average students (technically, below-median students - but it doesn't scan the same way). We can expect (or at least hope) that there's some correlation there. Which means that it's pretty likely that any material efforts to get more people to go to college will involve, mostly, getting below-average students to enroll in college.

It's hard to see that yielding much benefit. To be sure, there's (sadly) a large population of people who could do well in college that aren't attending - and getting those kids into college would be a great benefit. But if half your population is already getting a college degree, simple math tells you that you're probably at the point where you have to start enrolling below-average students if you want to get that proportion up. And while college might be broadening and valuable for someone who was at least a mediocre student in high school, it doesn't seem very likely to be a major benefit to someone who was a below-average student. It's unlikely to be rewarding for them, it's unlikely to materially improve their suitability for a job, and it's going to eat up years of their life and a ton of money and keep them from getting other experiences that might be more beneficial for someone who just doesn't perform well in an academic setting.

Albaby