I'm going to chalk this up to future shock and humanity's increasing inability to handle the now rapid rate of change. The economic role of college (before that, an aristocratic pursuit) is something society invented to tolerate the industrial rate of change, that fails at the current technological rate of change.

Pre-industrial economies: you did what your same-sex parent did. A man whose father was a carpenter became a carpenter. A woman whose mother worked the fields would also work in the fields. The needs of the economy didn't change very fast. Your childhood was spent planning to move into the role.

Industrial economy: society changes too fast for people to plan, in advance, for a specific job. That job may not exist. Jobs that don't exist now will be needed in 40 years. General education is required.

Technological economy: even faster rate of change. This is the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) economy in which every contribution should, ideally, be different. We still don't know what kind of educational process this type of economy mandates. It's all too new for us.

General education grew up in the industrial economy, and its purpose was to vouch that a person had sufficient intelligence to deserve specific mentoring that could be done as-needed at a later time. You got the college degree to prove that if you were put into management training for 2-3 years, you would learn enough to oversee a group of people doing industrial labor-- you didn't need to be an expert in that type of labor, which may not have existed when you got the degree. The college degree is insurance against economic change. You don't need to know in advance what industries will be in high demand in 30 years (that's impossible). You have proof on paper that you are adaptable enough that employers should invest in you.

The purpose of the college degree was to grant mobility by encouraging firms to invest. You can point to the fact that you successfully completed a 4-year, intellectually rigorous training process oriented toward general knowledge. The employer sees this and realizes it won't be a loss to put you in the 2-year rotational program it uses to bring up executives.

Lifelong employment at large corporations almost never exists in this technological economy, which leaves these concepts being a bit out-of-date. The industrial-era purpose of the degree was to convince employers to invest in you, and to learn general-purpose skills (management) that were unlikely to become obsolete due to industrial or mechanical changes.

In the technological era, most firms just don't invest in their employees at all on the assumption that, if they do so, people will take that capital and leave. In the industrial era, they "groomed" future leaders from within. In the technological era, they call executive headhunters. You might find a mentor by individually networking and building relationships, but the employer isn't going to make this happen and, if you're not someone's protege after 2 years, it makes the most sense to move on. The idea of corporate "loyalty" is gone on both sides and hopelessly anachronistic, and it won't come back any time soon.

The result of this is that (a) the economic return of the college degree has diminished to the point that it's becoming a terrible trade, but (b) people (college graduates or not) are ill-equipped to compete on the new, more fluid economy, and this lack of knowledge or capacity is causing people to cling to old, industrial-era patterns (such as the college degree immediately after high school) out of fear. The result is a system that's the worst of both worlds. Employers don't trust college degrees enough for them to serve their original purpose, so the positive validation of the degree is gone. What's now in play is that not having a college degree is a negative validation. People who didn't complete one are assumed, reflexively, to be lacking.