I'm a visitor from the dental forums, but I think that what is happening is happening across the board in every profession.
The government has been pouring unlimited money into higher education for decades now. The is no underwriting of student loans, no checking it against employment prospects, etc. Anyone who wants to go, can go, and they can just borrow unlimited money to do so. This creates an irresistible temptation amongst the schools to grow...whether to increase class sizes or to open a new school entirely. Of course this leads to saturation and underqualified students entering the profession, but the schools are making such a killing that they just don't care, or they find ways to rationalize it--saying things like they are in partnership with the government, "creating opportunity" for people to earn professional degrees.
The thing is, the "optometry pie" is only so big. Opening more schools and cranking out more optometrists does not enlarge that pie; it merely causes the existing pie to be divided into ever smaller pieces.
As bad as it is in optometry, it is much, much worse in law. Google the law school scam for details. What is happening in law is happening to all professional schools and to all of higher education generally. But nowhere is it as bad as in law. I think this is for two reasons:
1) all you need to open a law school is four walls and some books. No expensive lab equipment, no cadavers, no resource which is fundamentally subject to hard limitations of any sort. As long as the money keeps pouring in, they can build more schools and enlarge existing ones.
2) entry into the profession is not dependent on grades in "hard science" classes. At some level, even with all the inflation taking place, they still expect to accept only people with high grades. In the medical professions, the population of students with high grades in the necessary prerequisites, like the lab equipment and cadavers, is subject to something of a hard limitation. You can't just mint more A students in physics or chemistry. You can, however, mint just about as many "A" students as you want in "women's studies" or "concepts in art". This leads to a large surplus of people from such departments with "high" GPAs who consequently think they are smart and who think professional school is a good idea. Combine that with a government-backed student loan system which will give them all the unlimited money they want to pursue higher education, and combine that with a profession which requires very little overhead to open a school, and you have a malthusian ****ing catastrophe. And that is precisely what has happened in law.
Optometrists, take solace...you complain about "only" finding employment at 60k/year...fresh law school graduates--the LUCKY ones--are able to find 35k/year jobs working 70 hours a week in a doc review dungeon...all while trying to manage 150k+ of non-dischargeable debt.
Government subsidy of higher education needs to stop.
