Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma. I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.
Yes, the basic premise was that college is more expensive now, but that college graduates are not any more educated than they were decades ago.
Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts.
The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test.
The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.