If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.
This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).
There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.