单选题 In the 1990s, everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. A college degree, even a postgraduate degree, was essential for anyone who wanted a good job as one of those "symbolic analysts".
But computers are proficient at analyzing symbols; it is the messiness of the real world that they have trouble with. Therefore, many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not he has studied world literature.
This trend should have been obvious in 1996. Even then, America’s richest man was Bill Gates, a college drop-out who did not need a lot of formal education to build the world’s most powerful in- formation technology company.
Or consider the panic over "downsizing" that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90s was not especially high by historical standards. Downsizing suddenly became news because, for the first time, white-collar, college- educated workers "were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled mechanists and other blue-collar workers were in demand. This should have signaled that the days of ever-rising wage premiums for people with higher education were over.
Eventually, the eroding payoff(工资的发放)of higher education created a crisis in education it-self. Why should a student put himself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire credentials(资格;证书)with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training—paranursing (特别护理), carpentry, household maintenance and so on—pay nearly as much if not more than a job that requires a master’s degree, and pay more than one requiting a PhD.
So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one—a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.