However, a good education is much more than this. It includes the opportunity to engage in back-and-forth discussions with professors and classmates, building social and professional networks that can pay innumerable dividends, and to pursue experiences that aren't immediately related to career advancement.
College shouldn't merely be about vocational training. While that's one valuable outcome, there is much more that can be gained. Of course, many colleges (and individual students' experiences) fall far short of this—I wish I thought this way when I was in school, and didn't just see it as another hurdle to full adulthood—but that doesn't mean that the concept is flawed.
The big distinction that ends up causing all these arguments is that when people say it's a bad decision, they mean it's a bad financial decision when you go to college and take on debt to get a degree that won't lead to a well paying job. Of course everything is about context, so it might not be a bad life choice, but the debt certainly should not be ignored in evaluating that decision.
My local public library doesn't have a book on advanced logic design, for example. It favors a more 'general' collection, and thus books with heavy reliance on math tend to be omitted. Same with in-depth law books, they just aren't there.
Because, like it or not, the majority of people's education is the means to obtain a job in a related field. People don't go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for some l'art pour l'art interest development; they do it because they expect the benefit from the degree (i.e., as a ticket into the job market in a field related to the degree) to outweigh the cost.
The community college system is more than enough for those who view postsecondary education as a mere vocational program and doesn't require going "tens of thousands of dollars into debt".
I'm not arguing for the status quo, but let's be honest about the current state of higher education in America: a ton of people have too much debt because of the pressure to attend a 4 year university. This pressure is usually of the form, "good education => good job". Moreover, "good" is often conflated with "expensive" or "prestigious" with regards to education, and conflated with "high-paying" with regards to a job.
I think the problem is on the employer/recruiter side. They use college/university degrees as a signaling mechanism to weed out candidates. To make sure that everyone can get the signalling degrees the government offers student loans. The tuition costs rise for everyone including those who don't want a signalling degree. They end up paying more without reaping the benefits of the signalling mechanism.
Because you've borrowed an extraordinary amount of money, sometimes 2 or 3 years of what many Americans would consider a great salary, to attend said institution and the bank would like that money back at some point, they outline that fairly well in the documentation none of us read.
Honestly I think it's insane that one day, your given graduating high schooler has to raise his/her hand to go to the bathroom, and the next day they're entrusted to decide more or less how the next 70 years of their life will play out with incredibly little information at their disposal.
There's nothing wrong with philosophy or any of the classical educations, they are no doubt important. But priority #1 should be making sure your university's newest graduate doesn't starve to death in the street holding a $90,000 degree with "ANYTHING HELPS" written on the backside.
This is what I don't get: why is there an assumption that what you study at university has to be in any way related to the job market? You study something because you have an interest in developing it further, being able to get a job doing it is just a secondary perk.