It's a catch-22. There are a distinct lack of well paying blue-collar jobs in the U.S. If a young person wants to make a decent living it almost always requires higher education. This leads to a flood of outgoing high schoolers attending a university and a dilution of the value of a degree.

Good point, but there does make legitimate business sense to simply acquire and re-brand a product that has already garnered a substantial client base. It's good PR from a consumer perspective, good marketing since everybody that uses it will suddenly see the Hasbro logo everywhere, and it's almost an axiom that a bigger company's version of the same product is always going to be more expensive to develop and more clumsy to use. How much money did they waste going through the entire software development life cycle rebuilding something whose core functionality already exists? People don't play scrabble to see 3D flipping-tile animations.