> That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation.
Agreed, but there very well might be, and there probably is, the question I think is not 'if' but 'how much'.
> What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
Yes, there is a certain flexibility involved there, it's hard to re-train someone whose industry has just been outsourced from under them, all their domain specific knowledge has just turned worthless.
Knowledge workers have it a bit easier in that sense, they still have the problem but they might be able to adapt quicker than 'skill' based workers.
> If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable.
Yes, most likely.
> Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Telling someone what they should have done in the past is totally dumb, it didn't happen that way so it's completely pointless.
But for the people you outlined above, the ones trying to decide to go to college or not might do well to realize that one day they too will be 50, and if they're in the possession of a college degree then it might be to their advantage.
Notice that's a might, the article does not do much to explain the background of the graph, and I think that it has some truth to it but that is not evident from the presentation.