And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.:
> Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon.
> The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4, 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory
It gets worse from there.
You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly matters.
What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.
When people imagine a world of we didn't outsource factory work, they assume it will be exactly like ours but where all unemployed English majors become unionized factory workers. In reality, any policy comes with trade offs. People like Steve Jobs would have entered blue collared work, like their parents. Consumer electronics would be significantly more expensive when made by domestic labor, and that means there would be less competition and innovation in this space.
If the OP's type of comment makes you uncomfortable, you might be leaning too far into putting blame on ineptitude by default, instead of a healthy at least 50/50 mix of blaming greedy malice. OP just listed the 20/20 hindsight of this all. If that makes it sound like it was all a scheme, well - who knows - but it's just as unhelpful to always suppose such circumstances could have just been incompetence with no clear evidence.
Here, there's a kind of "big picture malicious", Sith-Lord-level piece of action being sketched, and that's in my opinion a categorically different thing. No group of conspirators got together in the 80s and secretly schemed for decades to make America's universities debt factories, at times against their own short-term interests, and are now sitting at the country club making evil laughter sounds. This vibe is the road to nihilist fatalism, it adds nothing, it helps nobody, it's just throwing your hands in the air and saying "I give up! The world is terrible!"
I do get the reluctance there though to doubt collective conscious evil action. Which is fine - it's usually far more likely it was done in a "market incentives aligning" way, even when they're entirely conscious (still evil) moves. I think those dark board rooms do happen still, but they're subtle, or relegated to just approving preplanned media narrative directions and such. They do make long term concerted plans, and some of those plans can be downright dark - but they also just go with the flow a lot, or plain fuck up on executions with better intentions.
I think the takeaway should be that neither maliciousness nor incompetence is really required to make evil exist - it's an ever-present network effect potential of the [capitalist] system itself, which will trigger due to some mixture of the above regardless. You can't especially blame greedy people for capitalizing on it, nor incompetent people from dropping the ball with it. It's simply a complex system that's probably due for a better design - and/or it's something we need to try and live with (survive through). Though that could all just be my own personal bias as a systems engineer who considers those the start and end point of most discussions.
Glad my point made it across though, thanks for saying that!
Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to produce a bad outcome" into a plan description unless you bring at least some evidence that it was, in fact, planned to go like that.