Ballooning tuition was an inevitable outcome, as was the speculative financialisation of educational institutions, and the relative loss of value of student teaching and post-grad research.
It's really just a form of compulsory loan sharking, and it's politically and economically cancerous.
Not only does it have immensely toxic second order effects, it's almost guaranteed to kill, or at least seriously damage, its host economy.
As for "useless majors" - one of the foundations of any civilised society is personal freedom, and that includes the freedom for cultural and intellectual exploration.
Forcing all activities to compete economically and sweat a profit is not freedom - it's the opposite.
I did not have a single lecture or discussion with any of my professors about how I could use my degree to get a job, what kind of careers I could pursue, and how to use my degree for anything outside of academia.
Humanities education has become "education for education's sake".
That's fine and all if the cost of tuition is low. But when you're spending $30k/year on tuition, your professors believing that "everyone should just go into academia" is just a bad investment.
I agree, this should be something more emphasized.
I also blame (to a degree) my K-12 career for not putting an emphasis on any courses related to budgeting or Home Economics.
http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-...
If random internet sites are to be believed, the $630 combined tuition plus fees in 1976 is roughly $2k today. An awful lot of students could manage that without aid.
I set myself with a well-known localized (to the industry) degree (Music Performance), but still couldn't implement it; even in a sense where I could turn it into something a bit more "useful" (Music Education).
Plenty of my classmates have gone on to utilize it effectively.
My major wasn't useless; I was.
>but it was well understood that majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving
The way you make such a condescending argument and blame the victim takes away any credibility in your comment. The issue is that tuition has ballooned since the 90s. Tuition is outpacing income/inflation and most else, so regardless of what school or major, the ROI is going down for most. Also, even if you went to a top-tier school and had student loans in the 1990s, you could discharge them in bankruptcy--until Bush changed that in 2005. Things really have gotten harder, it's not as you falsely claim that people are picking useless majors.