Hot take - College degrees are mostly a scam at these elevated prices and are just pillaging middle class American families.

I am 100% certain that I could get a high-school kid with a 30+ ACT and a good upbringing and decent vocabulary and put them in an entry level job at a Fortune 200/500 company and they would shine and progressively rise. The merits and quality of the raw material (the student) is 90% of the ultimate value, the rest is mostly experience.

The good kid would only need to take some essential classes and teach themselves some mechanics, programming, and physics, they would do just fine. College professors don't really teach the 30+ kids very much, just give them the reading list and experience, then good to go. Colleges are merely a toll booth to many kids. Peter Theil, Paypal and Palantir co-founder, has written and spoken expensively about this and acts upon it to recruit premium talent.

Another reason the expensive college is a scam is that direct competitors overseas are being offered at a fraction of the price. Imperial College of London, Swiss Federal Institute, Munich TU, New South Wales, Delft TU cost less than Ole Miss. The best Universities in the world, with English language options cost less than a barely accredited college in Lafayette County Mississippi. That's not even factoring the high quality universities in the 3rd world and Eastern Europe. You can talk with a new grad of decent Philippines university, you would not be able to Pepsi challenge with Philippine immigrant graduating from the University of Illinois. Same with Romanian kids.

Only immigration laws and limits on work visas keep the bubble from a spectacular pop.