There is a long-standing and persistent belief in our culture that family money somehow affects educational achievement.

This is true in the sense of being able to afford tuition and forgo income from working while going to school. It is also true that admittance to “elite” universities is unfortunately affected by family background in that these colleges preferentially admit the children and grandchildren of alumni, who tend to be more wealthy than the graduates of more pedestrian institutions.

But once tuition and admittance issues are addressed, the child of a plumber and the child of an investment banker are both presented with the same academic challenges that must be met. Grades are not awarded on the basis of family wealth, but academic performance. Coming from a wealthy family isn’t going to help someone write their term paper. Where the rubber meets the road, individual ability and effort are what count.

Higher education is losing its value as a social signaling device because the quality of higher education has fallen in recent years. As a college education has come to be seen as the natural cap-stone of EVERYONE’S academic career, regardless of actual individual ability, and government student loans have made students into cash cows for colleges and universities, academic rigor has suffered. Entire degree programs have been created from whole cloth whose sole purpose is to provide “students” with busy work until graduation day, at which point they will be set loose upon the world knowing almost nothing more than they did the first day of classes.

Employers have come to realize this, which is why a degree in Peace Studies or some other equally useless nonsense is not worth the paper it is printed upon.

At the same time, degree programs that have maintained their rigor and that provide their students with useful skills have retained their value.