Although the United States started from a much higher baseline than those other countries, its college enrollment more than quadrupled, too, from about 1.7 million in 1940 to 7.5 million at the end of the 1960s. Earlier generations would have wondered what kind of clean-hands work could be found for all those bookish people to do—and they would also have asked who would do the dirty work now that education had unsuited much of the population to it.
