If you take on a loan for college then you better hope you get a job out of it. If you want a degree with no economic prospects then you can just pay for it yourself. Remember college used to be an upper class thing where people chose their education freely precisely because they already had the ability to support themselves.

There is the other factor that a worker without a degree in the USA is partially redundant. A lot of jobs that do not require a degree can and have been moved to other countries. You are free to move there and work at your low skilled job there. There is a lot of demand there but not in the USA. You can chalk this up to an incompetent government or central bank but the reality is that as an individual you have no power over this and therefore an economic degree is your best bet.

The alternative to connecting college with the job market is to introduce a job training program inspired by Germany and let people enter a three year job training program in exchange for lower wages. That ship for this has sailed a long time ago. Now that college has been burned into the minds of everyone it will take decades to reverse the trend even if you start today with full force. Germany still has the lowest youth unemployment rate in the EU and is in the top 4 world wide.