When did this hypothetical 18 year old graduate? At least in 2000, the increase in college costs and difference in post-graduate pay was already widely covered in the media. From personal experience, one didn't need to look in order to hear about it.
I can imagine that it might not have been clear in 1990 or maybe even 1995, but pre-1995 high school graduates have probably paid off or discharged debt.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003030.pdf (1999 data, 2003 publication) has interesting data. Doesn't really make the case either way, just informative.
I think people pitching college as a magic "you go then you get a job" is pretty bad for sure. Mostly because it leaves out the part where you need to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze monetarily.
It's definitely doable and it's definitely worth it if you choose a path that actually supports the future you envision for yourself.
In my experience this is a very US-middle-class-upward-centric idea. The working class people I know who went to college were all rationally concerned about picking a degree with good employment prospects, as were most of the people I know from outside the US (where the "broad liberal education" is less valorized, or even non-existent).
Also, the idea of taxing "teachers, parents, and professors who lied to you" is absurd at face value.
Maybe I'm missing something, because this seems a bit too obviously absurd.
You can say that not everyone who draws on a 401k contributed to the problem, but that’s besides the point. If you forgive the debt, then nobody who is going to bear the cost will have had anything to do with creating the bubble.
I guess I misinterpreted your argument for taxing the "teachers, parents, and professors who lied to you".
The US has trillions (!!!) of dollars in liabilities that will need to be paid and we're still inacting tax cuts “because taxes are too high”.
Imagine that you're 18, and everyone you know tells you that you need to go to school to get a good job. People are competing to get into better schools, and you get admitted to a relatively nice private college with a beautiful campus. Your parents went to a similar college, graduated, got jobs, started a family, and are encouraging you to do the same thing.
Except now, college is something like 5x as expensive as it was for your parents, teachers, and advisors, adjusted for inflation. Your job prospects after college are worse, too. Maybe you manage to pull in $15/hr and you think it's pretty good, but meanwhile rent is 50% higher than it was for your parents and teachers.
You feel like you were lied to, betrayed, and you feel trapped. As a society, we created this problem. I'm not trying to take away agency from the people who chose to take out loans and study whatever they felt like, but we did send an army of teachers and academic advisers after our children telling them that college is what you need, and loans are how you pay for it.
The idea of a "non-economically practical degree" is a bit of a red herring, here. It doesn't matter as much which degree you get as an undergraduate. Sure, there are a few high-paying degrees like geology but in many fields you can get work with a range of degrees. Based on what I was majoring in, people would ask me if I was going to go into teaching, as if that were the only option for someone in my field. Yet here I am, working in industry.