Some 90% of people have a high school diploma now. All it means at this point is that you were not thrown out of school or locked in jail, and even then a lot of those people have it.

If someone said "I have a high school diploma" to you, what could you reasonably infer about their skills and abilities? Next to nothing.

The value from a degree arises from the fact that it is difficult and you can fail to acquire one. If everyone has a degree then not only does the signaling component of the degree disappear, the competitive advantage is also disappearing because everyone has the same baseline of competence. Electrical engineering or software engineering might be lucrative industries but only because companies can't fill all their openings. Once there are more workers than jobs we get the usual "McDonalds" hiring patterns.

This sounds like the actual problem is lack of jobs and bad economy. The employers are increasingly picky in their selection of people and people compete for increasingly higher degrees.

If economy was good, employers would have to be less picky, leading to people more likely to decide they dont need to compete over signaling.

It was actually getting better too until COVID. The labor market was tight and wages were rising, even in more rural areas.

> This sounds like the actual problem is lack of jobs and bad economy.

Prominently a lack of the factory production kind of work, I'd say.

So you keep people in school system(s) as long as possible. For people who would previously have gone to a factory after leaving school at age 16 or 18, you now keep them and give them a high-school+2y or +3y degree (it is free), and you release them only at 21-22 years old, they will be some random clerk performing some random procedure in some random client service or administration.

1. While they're in schools, they don't grow the unemployed figures.

2. Degrees guarantee a better chance for employment, they say. It is a stupid fallacy because it is only a comparative advantage, and when everyone gets one, even the advantage is gone.

So now, in France, by widening and easying them, we reached 95% of "success" for high-school degrees (which also grant access for universities). Also, high-school has become the almost unique way, so overall 80% of all kids get one of the high-school degrees every year. So, technically speaking, it means we're giving the high-school degree to a few light morons (or whatever it is called these days).

Cherry on the cake, they now finish high-school without having repeated any year (now, you can sleep your way through your whole primary/middle/high school career without repeating, no matter how little you do and you know, as long as you are not an exceptional PITA), so they are even less mature, which is another problem for practical and technical paths.

One big issue is that all those people at different levels think that they are valuable because they got a degree of some level. Except the degrees are valueless, and they are plenty of these people being given licences or master degrees. So there is a huge gap between what they think they will get (status and salary-wise)and what they will actually get.

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There is however a big difference between France and a lot of other countries: in France, good pupils do not go to University ; after high-school the top 5% (perhaps up to 10% now) goes on a path to Engineering schools (and similar paths for humanities) through competitive exams. One major consequence is that, opposite to most countries, the PhD does not represent the "elite" here. Of course there are gateways going one way or the other between the two systems, but still, the paths are pretty separated (and the gateways are mostly used to allow a few good ones from University that were missed earlier, to join Engineering schools after 2 and 4 years of University) and University/PhD is not considered the royal path. Actually, 40 % of PhDs are delivered to foreigners.

PhD is not specifically elite thing, PhD is specifically learn to be researcher education. As in generally being PhD and being engineer are two very different things. In areas where PhD is hard, they are also seen as proof that you are hard capable worker. Are you sure that seeking "royal path" and competition between PhD with Engineering is not a French artifact?

> Masters are the new Bachelors

And then you have people like this (https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-compu...) saying that a Masters degree is an indicator of incompetence...

In my experience, not all masters are created equal. When looking at resumes I like to differentiate between research track MS (basically, the first years of a PhD) and "classes only" masters. The former typically ends with a thesis and for CS the latter is typically aimed at folks doing a career change after an unrelated undergrad.

Now, there's nothing wrong with doing a CS masters to make a career change, but these masters indeed tend to have lighter curriculum than the undergrad version of a CS diploma.

What is the new PhD? Assistant prof? Ivy League PhD?

Postdoc

Absolutely. It's almost unheard of to work at a major academic institution without one. Becoming a professor is all preparation from 18-30, and then was an assistant you still have to grind and run errands to "earn your place".

Nobel Prize :-)