If everybody has a college degree, then those skills aren’t rare and you won’t get paid highly for them. Salary is about how hard you are to replace, not how good/qualified you are.
The problem definitely is that we push people to college. You don’t need a college degree for 90% of the jobs out there and we’ve completely watered down what a college degree is because we wanted everyone to have one.
I disagree. Your model only works under the assumption that the economy can only have so many jobs. If the US graduated 10x as many engineers from 1990 until now, the economy would be much larger than it is today. Which means that salaries may even be higher because despite a 10x increase in workforce, the demand for them may have increase by 15x.
This is an easily observable situation. Regions with concentrations of talent tend to have much higher salaries for such people than regions where that talent is scarce.
No, the argument only assumes that the number of jobs won't increase in proportion to the number of college degrees, which is obviously true.
We tell them it's necessary because it is for most people. The decades of data made this an indisputable fact: people with college degrees earned higher salaries, had better jobs, enjoyed much lower unemployment rates, and were generally better off than their under-educated peers.
The problem is not that we push people to attend college, the problem is entirely the cost of education.