I've been pushing my view that we should shut down fluff “easy major” degrees in most colleges as glorified vacations for young adults, and a few people asked what's the harm if taxpayers don't pay for this. Of course, taxpayers do pay for this, but my point is more general. We've now developed a system of broad-scale college attendance by people who can only survive college if they are warehoused in fluff “easy majors” that require little raw intelligence and little work. This generated a vicious cycle where employers look at fluff grads, shake their heads, and say, “if even these bozos were able to get a degree, the candidates without degrees must be exceptionally dumb or lazy”. Hence the demand for more fluff majors by people who wouldn't otherwise be in college. Hence the supply of ever more innovative fluff majors by colleges.

Even if this was costless for taxpayers (which it certainly is not), this is a terrible misallocation of human capital. Young people should not be encouraged to take four/five year long vacations in their most productive years. Universal-college driven by fluff majors is a serious drain on the economy and society. It is worse than the damage caused by the universal military service because it is twice as long and affects both men and women. The only thing worse than the withdrawal of young adults form the labor force was the withdrawal of married women back in the day.

Oh, and spare me the tired bromide of “but they learn civic lessons that they wouldn't have otherwise learned”. There is zero empirical evidence of that. People learn civic lessons by interacting with real, diverse people at work, learning to be self-sufficient, helping run a business, volunteering, participating in local affairs and politics, and making themselves useful, not by sleeping though “the city and the poetics of the unknowable” class, followed by a keg party.