Your college advantage has been discontinued

At some point, going to college was an advantage. If an employer had two applicants and one had finished high school while the other had gone on to college, the degree could distinguish one from the other. Fair enough. Then humans noticed.

More people went to college and more employers expected applicants to have degrees. Other parents told their children they needed to go to college because employers expected degrees. More students went because not going increasingly looked like the risky choice.

And eventually we accomplished something rather impressive. We took an advantage and turned it into a requirement. This is one of civilization’s better tricks. It happens because competitive advantages don’t sit quietly inside the machine that acquired them. They change the environment for everybody else.

If one applicant has something employers value, that applicant may have an advantage. But once enough applicants have it, the comparison changes. Now having it doesn’t necessarily move you ahead. Not having it may move you behind.

Advantage → adoption → new baseline → disadvantage for non-adopters → more adoption.

It becomes a civilization ratchet. And ratchets don’t have to stop just because everyone reached the new baseline. Once lots of people have college degrees, having a college degree isn’t quite the differentiator it used to be.

So now we can ask another question. Where did you go? Community college certainly counts as college, but nobody is going to spend the next forty years introducing you with it. Nobody says, Sammy has led three companies, written two books, raised four children and attended Mesa Community College in 1987. Harvard, on the other hand, may follow Sammy around until she dies.

So the competition can move upward. College isn't enough to distinguish you anymore, but perhaps a prestigious college will. And now getting access to that advantage becomes its own competition.

Which means the ratchet can also move backward. You don't start competing for Harvard when you fill out the application. You need the grades. But everybody applying has good grades, so you take harder classes. And other students take harder classes.

You add extracurriculars. Somebody else has more extracurriculars. Sports. Music. Volunteering. Leadership. Test preparation. Tutoring. Admissions consultants. Carefully planned summers. Maybe something sufficiently interesting to make an admissions officer pause after reading applications from four hundred other seventeen-year-olds who also appear to have spent their childhood curing diseases between soccer practice and AP Chemistry.

And in some families this preparation starts long before high school. There are parents thinking about competitive schools before their child applies to kindergarten. Which means a five-year-old can already be entering the ratchet that is supposed to position them for the school that positions them for the school that positions them for the college that positions them for the adult life nobody involved can actually see yet.

That's the especially interesting part. Civilization can ratchet before anybody knows whether the thing they're competing for will actually pay off. The machine doesn't need proof that a prestigious university will materially improve this particular child's life twenty years from now. It has to forecast from the information available now.

If parents represent the better school as increasing future opportunity, they have to compare that trajectory with the possibility that other children will receive an advantage theirs won't. If students represent the prestigious college as improving future employment, networks, status or access, they have to compare pursuing it with the True Cost of not pursuing it while everyone else does.

And employers participate too. A credential can become a convenient signal precisely because somebody else already did the work of selecting the person. The university chose this applicant from thousands of applicants. Perhaps that tells the employer something useful or maybe it doesn't.

The especially peculiar part is that nobody has to think this arrangement is a good idea. Parents can believe the competition is ridiculous and still enroll their children in every available activity because not doing so appears riskier. Employers can suspect that a degree isn't particularly relevant to the job and still use it to narrow the applicant pool. Students can wonder whether four years of college will actually prepare them for anything and still enroll because the jobs they want require it. Each machine can see problems with the arrangement while forecasting an even greater cost from refusing to participate. And every time enough machines make that calculation, they help preserve the conditions that made participation seem necessary in the first place.

The ratchet doesn't have to wait around for civilization to conduct a forty-year controlled experiment. It only needs enough machines to represent the advantage as consequential and respond. That's how something optional can become expected without anybody declaring it mandatory.

A student entering college now is buying a credential for a labor market four years away while AI is changing what kinds of work humans will even be doing. The forecast horizon got worse while the price of the bet got larger.

Nobody had to announce that a bachelor's degree would become the entry ticket for jobs that previous generations did without one. Nobody had to announce that once everybody had the entry ticket, the name printed on the ticket would become another way to sort people. There didn’t have to be a notice that parents should start accumulating advantages years before their children were old enough to understand what college was.

Each machine only had to look at the competitive environment it encountered and forecast the cost of opting out. And once enough of them opted in, the environment changed again. Click. Another tooth on the ratchet.