Further, the incentives are misaligned. I wonder if we (USA) restored government funding for higher ed, would college programs be more honest about graduation rates and job placements.

When I was working in academia as a researcher it was all EU or UK Government funding and those incentives were just as misaligned.

They need to though. I wish it wasn’t the case, but largely it is in my opinion.

Do any career options give recent graduates a realistic idea of what is involved in working in that field?

I'm not sure that academia is any worse than a lot of other fields and it does, potentially, have a lot of advantages.

[e.g. I co-founded a startup with someone I met in academia]

In a crude sense, more career options swing the relationship in favor of the employees vs employers, so it can be used as a guideline for whether a career will be rewarding and fairly compensated.

I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)