Sure, we just have to restructure a significant portion of our educational pipeline and employment/hiring process and figure out what to do about a trillion or two of debt to do this, piece of cake.

This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a handful of individuals getting their first job - once you have an employment history, the fact that someone was willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who can also attest to this.

(although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are going away - referrals to an open position within the referrer's company are still a golden ticket but nobody cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2 years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market. Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in the broader labor market nobody cares about references when employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that never should have existed are coming down, and references are one of them.)

Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely improvement that is possible in this area, but no business case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you have that first job under your belt... nothing that came before really matters. When was the last time an interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when they are considering you for the position of forklift operator. It's an issue that solely matters to the people getting their first job, and once you're hazed, you're "in the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired repeatedly.

They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company, or that you made large contributions or substantially matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know. References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the 10-year mark.

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for something that is basically only used to get you your first job and never matters again, is obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees entirely, employers are still going to find some similar signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use in an interview process.

Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public" and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in many european countries), because in the long term they are more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to pass for you to get a good job.

We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible given the broad dysfunction of the american system.

Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education around core computer-science and software-engineering concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great, but neither is the broader job market) around various technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and a bad trajectory.