The same problems exist everywhere. Nothing US specific about it. There is no institutional system within higher education to ensure quality across the board, so whether you get a good experience or not is down to the individual professors and staff, not anything you can systematically rely on. The same is true of research outputs. Pick a random paper from a random field. It might be good, if you're really lucky it might even be useful, but it might also be full of faked data, fake citations and built on false premises. My experience has been that there's no way to tell up front. Field has predictive value, brands mean nothing.

I went to a supposedly good university in the UK (Durham), to do a computer science degree. The university is in the so-called "Russell Group" of leading research universities and comes a little below Oxbridge in the rankings. That turned out to mean nothing: the course itself was garbage, with the department and its course being almost entirely fake. Cheating by the professors was rampant because they really didn't want to do teaching (teaching programming is notoriously hard), and universities mark their own homework, so if they don't want to do it properly there's nothing forcing them to do so as long as they team up and cover for each other. The students also didn't care because they were all struggling and happy to conspire a little with their teachers in order to get the bit of paper they were all there for. I was gutted, I'd been looking forward to doing CS at university literally since being a little kid. My parents had been singing its praises for years, but looking back I wonder to what extent they were just flattered to be allowed to go at all. My mother was the first of her family to go to university and they were all super proud of her, a common story in that era.

After graduation relatively few of the students took jobs related to doing computing, let alone to do computer science. A lot went off to do things like accounting, subject switches, banking, one even became a VC. After graduating I went to work for Google and was assigned to interviewing rotation. On that road you learn pretty quickly that degrees mean nothing. The best candidates have random degrees in unrelated subjects. Back then people with CS degrees from supposedly top universities regularly couldn't start new projects in the editor/IDE of their choice, couldn't write programs that load text files from disk and struggled to manipulate arrays. Sometimes people with no degree at all managed to get past the recruiter firewall and breezed their way through it. Even job history was of little use back then, though I imagine it's got more signal now.

Asking people if college is worth it is a tricky thing, because it conflates two very different things. Is it worth it for the educational value? I suspect many realize the answer is no. Is it worth it to get past the ever escalating auto-filters HR departments like to mount? Maybe still, but that's not a sustainable perspective. Soon people will master the art of using LLMs to review CVs properly and cut HR out of the loop. The prompts probably won't be dwelling on elite universities outside of the few firms that have incorporated that demand into their cultural DNA.