If I have a paper wallet that has .001 btc, could this be worthless in the future because when I sweep the funds the fee is so high?
Yes! That's possible, and in 2017 we've seen times when 0.001 BTC wasn't enough to send a transaction with 1 input.
How about if I have a paper wallet with .005 btc, assuming it was funded with 5 separate transactions of .001
That's almost the same: the transaction will be almost 5 times larger, and so will the fee. You should read
Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs!.
trying to learn more and educate myself about the technical side of Bitcoin and sweeping and utxos and how high fees in the future could be an issue for small paper wallets like this
There is no upper limits for fees. But even if you can't send your funds at some moment in the future, that doesn't mean it's worthless. You'll just have to wait for fees to go down again.
Examplesomeone made
this 4909 bytes transaction with 33 inputs and 510 Satoshis/byte fee. After paying fees, his 0.033
BTC turned into only 0.0079539
BTC.