Yes higher EDU is incredibly expensive but the second part really rubs me the wrong way. There is no such thing as a "useless" degree. It all depends on the effort made by the graduate in question and how they market themselves after graduation. For someone to speak about education at length as you do and then turn around and say something so defamatory is insane to me and just flat-out wrong.
Ask some of the 20 and 30 somethings who are sitting on $100,000 or $200,000 of debt for degrees in the humanities that have little practical application in the real world. The higher education industry markets the need of a college degree to teenagers, essentially telling children that their dreams are not possible without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper. What the Higher Ed industry knows, as do many of us, is that those degrees are not remotely created equal. Rather than pivot their product to a modern society, many of the liberal arts schools in particular have doubled down on very expensive degrees in the humanities of questionable ROI.
This is "marketing cigarettes to kids" level evil. Actually, it is worse, because a kid that starts smoking can quit smoking. A kid that borrowed $200,000 for a degree in the Classics will have every aspect of their life negatively impacted. They will have a lower standard of living, often have credit problems their whole life which can impact their career, and will even have their choice of mates impacted because love is love, but taking on $200,000 of debt for a degree they didn't get is asking a lot of any future spouse. Getting some of these degrees literally ruin many people's lives.
A big difference between young people today and when Gen X got out of college in the 90's and early 2000's is that when we were in college, everyone just kind of got a degree and then got a job. Employers would be willing to train recent college graduates, and kids with a humanities degree may have a bit more trouble getting that first job, but once they got started, they would still be able to head off into their careers. But back then, there was an endless discussion in the media about how America was turning out too many lawyers.
As a result, starting in the 90's, more and more kids went into STEM majors. I can't find the data right now, but I believe colleges are turning out twice the STEM graduates today compared to 2000. I believe that other type of "trade degrees" like business are up significantly, albeit not at the same growth rate. That is a lot of kids graduating college every year with skills that are immediately applicable in the workplace. This has the effect of making the humanities degrees less valuable, because companies do not need to hire someone with a generic degree when they can hire someone with a STEM or business degree.
The state schools went hard into STEM and business in the 1990's while the prestige privates would actually have Presidents who derisively referred to those majors as "vocational degrees". Weird how most of the Ivies now offer "vocational degrees" too now. Many of the smaller liberal arts colleges will never get there. But the STEM and business degrees presented other challenges. Professors in those fields are expensive compared to a history or English professor, because a CS or engineering professor has a lot of opportunities in the private sector. As a result, a lot of universities have marketed STEM and business majors without the capacity to bring everyone through to a degree. My information is anecdotal, but Maryland is developing a reputation for doing this. Pulling a kid into a program, having the kid spend two years and $100,000 (for an out of state kid), and then telling the kid and his family that either they have to take a lesser degree or transfer, is unethical, or worse.
Kids can get any degree they want and can afford. But it is certainly not "defamatory" of me to point out that the universities have been selling degrees that have a negative or very poor ROI.