Stephen Carson posts on Garrison Keilor's worship of the GI Bill. It's worth reading Carson's whole post, and following his link to Tom DiLorenzo's article on the GI Bill's role in the politicization of American higher education, but where my mind is these days has my focused on this issue:

Keilor:

The cost to taxpayers for the GI Bill was about $5.5 billion, but the result was 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors, and thousands of other professionals. It helped spur one of the greatest economic booms in American history.

Carson:

He seems to implicitly assumes that because the GI Bill produced more professionals of various sorts that it was obviously a great thing. Besides the unconscious self-congratulation that one expects from the intelligentsia ("more of us is clearly what the world needs"), there is the matter of how many college degrees is optimal. Should every man, woman and child have a PhD? If not, what is the right number? How does Keillor know that 450,000 engineers was exactly what society needed at that time?

What I'll add is this: How is it, with the quality of education dropping over the course of the 20th century (grade school, high school, university, post-grad), that so few people see the connection between that decline and the subsidizing and universalizing of formal schooling?

This is a glaring example of the post-hoc fallacy: because it seems that many smart and successful people went to university, therefore we conclude that the university must have made them smart and successful. So if we just send everyone to college, the entire population will become smarter and more successful.

But again, if we're willing to entertain A-before-B-means-A-caused-B, why do so few people look at the possibility that the tax-funded tuitions have caused ever-lower standards for what counts as being educated?

My cynical hypothesis is that most people do recognize the connection between universalization and mediocritization but are so religiously devoted to the egalitarian creed that they assume the equality gains somehow outweigh the quality losses. They believe this, but only implicitly. Out loud, no one wants to talk about trade-offs. Better to list impressive numbers and titles, as Keilor does.