You're precisely correct in that the baccalaureate degree has long since become the secondary diploma of just a few decades ago. The zeitgeist is not that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college, but more or less explicitly that everyone deserves a college degree. And, of course, that cheapens the value of the degree, and every subsequent degree one might or does earn.
I've been on both sides of the lectern in universities and colleges in recent years, and the sense of lazy entitlement is just astonishing. And the schools are responding in the way they can: MBAs are handed out like candy; at the (private, ostensibly not-for-profit) university where my wife taught, faculty were expected to recruit from their communities. Students, oddly, rarely failed anything, irrespective of their performance. Pretty disgusting. The answer? People need to stop going to graduate school, but more importantly, graduate schools need to stop accepting so many of their applicants.* The degree is being, as Alaren said above, utterly washed out and sapped of its real "buying power", if you will.
(* This is much less true in the technical fields, somewhat less in the sciences, though they're catching up, but very very true in the social sciences and especially the liberal arts.)
