This. Not every job or career needs a college education. A lot of college tracks, such as a lot of liberal arts, while useful in the general sense have few corresponding career paths with a resumable ROI for all the debt that those paths lead to.

And, what is worse is that in general there is no, or very limited, concept of on job training. Everyone wants experts who can become productive on day one.

The amount of time you hear "I dont use anything I learnt in college, its all about experience on the job!" definitely screams "we need to encourage apprenticeship-type learning over college".

Yes, exactly, that's what I had kinda meant that a lot of jobs require more apprenticeship type training, than a formal college.

Apprenticeships might also lead to career mobility. Try a job/training, if you don't like it, try something else. In a 4-year college you end up making a commitment where sunk-cost fallacy kinda prevents you from just moving on to something else if things don't work out.

Yup. College is often an apprenticeship too (just super expensive) anyway, with how common co-op programs are (which are basically just apprenticeships)

I wonder if the US economy could change to accommodate all that education. If it could change the proportion of low-education (and typically low wealth creating) jobs and simply have more people working at higher-levels, creating more wealth. Why are there so many low-productivity, low-wealth-creating jobs that don't require higher levels of education (be that college or other), and what can we do about it?

Does this really follow? If automation continues to eliminate low skill jobs, is cutting down on academic education a solution? But maybe it automation cuts down white collar jobs just as much. Anyway,making the populace less erudite feels like the wrong way to go. Unless institutional education is obsolete.