There is one more factor. People at 18 aren't really fit to make such huge financial decisions, most of them don't have experience handling even 0,1x that amount of money. They are still pushed to, and the other party is much more experienced and stronger than them.
It is a masterpiece of college politics that students tend to turn "anti-Capitalist" and attack greed of private corporations, while completely ignoring that they are being fleeced in a predatory way by their own schools. Academic institutional greed is the true 400 lb gorilla in the room that few are capable of acknowledging.
That's what I've always read: that it's a simple and effective filter for going from a mountain of job applications to a hill of them.
[1] There are the standard places to define like Wikipedia. The link I offer here is an A16Z podcast with Marc Andreesen and Vijay Pande where Marc gives an overview about 3 minutes in.
https://a16z.com/podcast/baumols-cost-disease-in-healthcare-...
[2] https://aa.org
Many businesses use a college degree as a blunt hiring filter. This increases demand for degrees if only to check a box.
Baumol’s Cost Disease. Anything that is done manually cannot be automated and therefore requires a lot of labor input. So services continuously rise in price unlike mass produced goods that get cheaper over time. The same phenomenon affects childcare, live performance art, non-prefab construction, crops that are picked by hand, and nursing homes.
State governments have decreased funding. So more money has to come directly from state college enrollees.
Many colleges are in a ranking arms race instead of truly prioritizing affordability. Recruiting star professors and building new facilities is expensive.
Community colleges cut out a lot of non-essential services. It’s how they’re able to offer instruction at a tenth of the tuition.