The other factors may be things like the following:
- A generation or few ago, a high school graduate was more likely to find work and be self supporting.
- A generation or few ago, college was less expensive.
- A generation or few ago, a college graduate was likely to have decent job opportunities, even from a lower prestige college in a major without much in the way of major-related job prospects.
- The gains from economic growth are now more concentrated in a few industries like finance, and more concentrated at the top of the income/wealth distribution.
Such things increase the pressure toward colleges, and especially elite colleges, in the following ways:
- More high school graduates feel that they need to go to college to get a good job.
- Many of them feel that they need to graduate from an elite college or a high-demand major in order to get better jobs than they could as high school graduates. With college being expensive, graduating college only to take a high school graduate job is seen as a waste.
- Elite colleges are seen as feeders for plutocrat-path jobs in finance, where one can gain a bigger share of the now much more unequally distributed gains of economic growth.