Riding a huge wave of federal funding and widespread publicity, American higher education grew rapidly from 1970 to 2010. People were convinced that getting a degree (in anything) from a prestigious college or university would ensure later success in life. The expense? Don’t worry about it! College pays off, and you don’t want a life of drudgery, which is what you’ll be doomed to if you don’t get your college credentials.

But things are changing, as Glenn Harlan Reynolds points out in this New York Post column.

Enrollments have been declining for more than a decade, yet more worrisome for the higher-ed establishment is the idea that prestigious-college degrees are a barrier to the latest left-wing mania, namely “equity.” Reynolds writes:

The Gartner consulting firm recently recommended its 15,000 clients, in the name of equity, consider hiring people without degrees at all. The focus on degrees is bad for “underrepresented candidates” because they’re less likely to have attended, or finished, college. Gartner suggests employers instead focus on ‘assessing candidates solely on their ability to perform in the role,’ rather than on their ‘formal education and experience.’

The delicious irony in this is that the absurd notion that the country is suffering from some awful “inequity,” which can only be resolved by equal representation of all groups in all things, came from progressive zealots in those very colleges and universities whose degrees might now be considered to be exacerbating it.

Maybe the United States is recovering from its long bout of credentialitis. The number of jobs that intelligent people without college degrees couldn’t possibly be trained to do are relatively few to begin with. Degrees from prestigious institutions shouldn’t be considered more valuable than those from supposedly lesser ones.