I don't believe in the usefulness of "overeducation" as a concept. No amount of knowledge or learning should ever be considered too much. What I do believe, however, is that vocational training should be decoupled from education, and that everyone should be seeking both.
If you decouple it, a lot less people will go on to seek both. I actually think they shouldn't be decoupled for that very reason -- I'd rather have a population learned in a variety of subjects.
What is the main problem is the cost of higher education. I really hope the experiment at Georgia Institute of Technology (CS degree at less than $7k) works out wonderfully. I really think that with some more improvement here and there, it is the way to go.
Are you arguing that spending more effort educating yourself on a particular subject never becomes suboptimal? Are you just talking past the parent? Or do you actually believe in storing information in brains for storing-information-in-brains' sake, even if it's ten years of study of pokémon glitches?
You're putting up a strawman. Information for the sake of information is not knowledge, nor learning. One can spend their whole life watching reality TV and name every single celebrities in existence - hardly anyone would call that act "learning" or "acquiring knowledge".
Of course if one could still be learning in a suboptimal way: acquiring useless information, or acquiring information without understanding of the subject matter, but that's an orthogonal issue altogether: it's suboptimal regardless of your effort/time/how much knowledge you had.
At the very least, I found it hard to believe that in this time and age, one can acquire enough knowledge of any subject (breath or depth) that any more effort would be suboptimal. The other choice of thinking "I know enough and don't need to care anymore" is potentially far far more dangerous.
