Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

The economics of higher education isn't aligned between personal and societal interest in general. College degrees are a positional good - a good portion of their value is for allocating a job to Peter instead of Paul. Even as people rationally choose more prestigious and more thorough education, we end up destroying value on a societal scale.

Like, even if a daycare worker finds it easier to get a job with a college degree, are we better off as a society if more daycare workers have college degrees? I think not.

You could say the same thing about almost literally anything that you have to pay or work for. If two candidates are otherwise equal and one had a brand new car, I might use the new car as a tie-breaker.

I'd bet having a college degree is much more than a tie-breaker in most cases - it shows a level of work, discipline, and probable intelligence that is genuinely an advantage for most jobs.

(This is problematic because it also shows a huge set of advantages that the degree-holder has had. If somebody has enough advantages to have a degree and is applying for a daycare position, it might mean something is very wrong for this person and maybe it should tip the tie-breaker situation the other way!)

Exactly that: it shows a level of work, discipline, and intelligence. It doesn't cause any increase in the ability to work, be disciplined, or be more intelligent. Society is better off if this is something like a prestigious high school degree, rather than a Bachelor's.

I can't hire for things that 'cause' such increases, I can only use presented-information to make a best-guess about how an employee will perform.

Having a degree is a good indicator that you'll work hard and be disciplined. If I have to break a tie between two candidates, things that show levels of work/discipline/* will help me break the tie.

Again, that's perfectly fine and reasonable in individual situations. It's also not an argument for society getting more education as a whole. The tie-breaking for you is the same whether it's between high school diploma vs bachelor's degree, or a bachelor's vs master's. Making the high school degree holder get a bachelor's and the bachelor's get a master's doesn't help society as a whole.

I agree that a rigorous high-school education could just a well serve as a filter as the higher ed studies do today. Unfortunately, high school is mostly low-quality, low-effort waste of time these days, so finishing it does not signal much to the employees (maybe with exception such as Eton and other elite private schools).