America's post-war strength
was built on unusually strong education. After the war, America had far more schooling overall than other countries. It was one of the many factors that made America a powerhouse in the 50s and 60s.
Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.
>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.
High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.
India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.
>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.