The two options here are that either all the businesses using college degrees as a signal are wrong and they could be saving a lot of money by hiring non college educated applicants for slightly less pay and building them up.
OR college education is a useful signal and so businesses are willing to pay a higher price for it.
If the prior were true, then I would assume a business would have developed already to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity. It is not a novel or less known idea.
It would be better if we found ways to let young people get into white collar and middle class professions without spending $100K and four years of their lives. This used to be possible. I'm quite sure it could be done again, but collectively we're not going to go there. Yet, anyway.
Sure, but it answers the question of why a degree is “needed”, and that is given the supply and demand curves for labor, the suppliers of labor need it to compete with each other.
> It would be better if we found ways to let young people get into white collar and middle class professions without spending $100K and four years of their lives.
Really simple, remove all taxpayer funded (including guaranteed) education loans, and any special bankruptcy protection they might have.
And by all means, keep complaining and if you have some power, use it to fix the system. But don't incentive people to act in self-defeating ways.
This probably wasn't the situation prior to the USA population tripling over the last 70-80 years while tech/automation has acted as a limiting force to job growth. It's easy to say the cost of college has skyrocketed because of cheap non-discharable debt but it's pusdo-requirement has also caused demand to skyrocket too.