We are better now at credentializing than at educating

From The Evolution of the US Family Income‐Schooling Relationship and Educational Selectivity by Christian Belzil and Jörgen Hansen. From the Abstract:

We estimate a dynamic model of schooling on two cohorts of the NLSY and find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the effects of real (as opposed to relative) family income on education have practically vanished between the early 1980's and the early 2000's. After conditioning on a cognitive ability measure (AFQT), family background variables and unobserved heterogeneity (allowed to be correlated with observed characteristics), income effects vary substantially with age and have lost between 30% and 80% of their importance on age‐specific grade progression probabilities. After conditioning on observed and unobserved characteristics, a $300,000 differential in family income generated more than 2 years of education in the early 1980's, but only one year in the early 2000's. Put differently, a $70,000 differential raised college participation by 10 percentage points in the early 1980's. In the early 2000's, a $330,000 income differential had the same impact. The effects of AFQT scores have lost about 50% of their magnitude but did not vanish. Over the same period, the relative importance of unobserved heterogeneity has expanded significantly, thereby pointing toward the emergence of a new form of educational selectivity reserving an increasing role to non‐cognitive abilities and/or preferences and a lesser role to cognitive ability and family income.

Hard to interpret this study just from the abstract.

I think it is saying, in part, that compared to forty years ago, education attainment outcomes are materially more weakly associated with family income. How much a household earns is less predictive today of education attainment.

If that is so, it could be a quite positive outcome, indicating that we are getting better at finding cognitive talent wherever it lurks and getting it into the education system in a fashion which allows its fruition.

But the last couple of sentences seem to indicate that there is greater education attainment simply because we are demanding cognitively less from students. Which defeats the purpose and is merely an act of credentialization rather than educating.