"If the American kids really are afraid of ending up like the other college grads being stuck without jobs, they should study harder, "
This is hilarious and can be compared to: There are thirty NBA teams and twenty million teenagers so the obvious national educational and employment strategy should be to tell all twenty million teens to just practice harder if they don't want to end up unemployed.
If as per the pigeonhole principle, if the numbers don't match up, just handwave away the unlucky ones, let them eat cake.
Using example of NBA doesn't really work imo because of the skewed statistics. No one is saying high school students shouldn’t study because only a very small percentage will ultimately earn PhDs. That's not what the OP and my comment is about.
What handwaving? An entire generation S Koreans in 1950 - 80 basically 'studied' their way out of extreme poverty. They have no oil or any other useful natural resource to speak of.
Obviously studying hard in school wasn't the only reason as they got a few other lucky breaks, but ultimately it was the education that got them out of poverty.
"but ultimately it was the education that got them out of poverty"
How? What is your economic system wide reaction mechanism? I think the problem is confusing macro and micro. On a micro level yes one individual can rise above others in that way. However, on a macro level diverting capital out of productive enterprises into merely increasing existing underemployment stats makes the overall situation worse for everyone, not better.
I'm not saying education is worthless, or underemployment should be 0% (or maybe it should?).
Think about this analogy. Maximum productivity resulting in maximum wealth for everyone involved happens when a factory produces 1000 cars. I know, lets produce 1500 cars, and also increase prices 10% per year, then having those unsold cars sit on the lot will make society as a whole wealthier because ... err, I guess it makes society as a whole substantially poorer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying producing 1500 is a disaster therefore producing 500 would be genius, that would also be pretty bad. I'm also not making any moral or ethical or environmental value judgement about manufacturing cars.
Its basically the economic broken window fallacy.
Another way to look at it, is if you know about control system theory, taking an unstable system and pushing it hard in an even more unstable direction is not going to work well.
WRT the Korean example, as a cheap hobby or time filling past time, there's nothing inherently wrong with education, it didn't hold them back as far as I know. Nobody was spending money on liberal arts professors instead of spending the same money on welding robots and conveyor belts. Not that there's anything wrong with the liberal arts and making life worth living, just that it is orthogonal to economic productivity.
This is hilarious and can be compared to: There are thirty NBA teams and twenty million teenagers so the obvious national educational and employment strategy should be to tell all twenty million teens to just practice harder if they don't want to end up unemployed.
If as per the pigeonhole principle, if the numbers don't match up, just handwave away the unlucky ones, let them eat cake.