I sympathize with and agree with a lot of the points you're making, but think they apply in an environment that doesn't really apply anymore. Our society as a whole is trending toward a situation where I think other factors are at play too.

I have never had student loan debt, so I'm not trying to defend any decisions I made.

However, part of why I was able to do that was because college was actually affordable at the time I went. Not easy to afford, but not something that would break the bank either. If tuition were at those levels now, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Another fundamental problem is the increasing "credentialization" of labor supply in the US. What I mean by this is that employers, broadly speaking, do not approach employees as investments, but rather as objects. So a potential employee is not seen as someone who could be trained or learn, but as someone who performs a given task. The way they do this, moreover, is to rely on a credential that documents their ability to perform a specific task.

I don't think people always go into, say, English, because they think there's lucrative business opportunities or because they are incompetent. I think they go into it because they reasonably see themselves as having a diverse set of skills, and as being capable of doing more than what their degree focused on. This is the philosophy of a liberal arts degree, after all. They major in English because they think "I like English, and I'm going to hone my communication skills, and can always get work in something else or go to graduate school because I'm competent enough, and my degree will document my ability to function in a broad set of tasks. But when they are done, rather than seeing this, "oh this person is capable of understanding and completing a broad range of things, because they have a liberal arts degree," employers approach them as if their degree is a mark of identity: "oh, you do literature."

There are many exceptions of course, and I'm not saying that advanced skillsets aren't often necessary. But as a society, we tend to have a very narrow-minded idea of a person. If you do math, you can't write; if you do english, you can't do math, etc. And there's always graduate school. I don't mean that as a joke, I mean that if you see yourself as pursuing more advanced skills in some area anyway, why should it matter what your undergraduate degree is?

These calls for more "usable" degrees, and blaming individuals for seeking expensive college education always seem disingenuous to me, because it's often the businesses demanding the degrees in the first place, one way or another. And what does everyone think would happen if there were suddenly a flood of STEM graduates?

This also has all sorts of other manifestations too. E.g., the only way you can learn to do procedure X (not only do, but learn to do) is if you are a nurse, PA, or physician. Or the only way you can manage is if you have an MBA or masters of management or something like that.

Anyway, to me the root problem is businesses not seeing individuals as investments, but as widgets. They're trying to offload costs as much as possible. If you can't provide me with X now, you're not worth it. It's part of a broader trend, in not investing in R&D, etc. and so forth. I think even engineer types run into this with job ads that have ridiculously specific requirements. Do those really make sense to anyone in the field? If I completed a BS in comp sci from a decent university with decent grades, do you have any doubt that I could manage MS SQL Server?