College is only worth it if you are a member of the elite, your parents (or scholarships) pay all of your tuition, and you go to an Ivy league school and make connections with other powerful families. For the rest of humanity, it's a usurious scam. Signing up kids for high interest loans they can't discharge is straight up evil. Maybe they get a job and can pay it off, but what if they can't? If I could erase from my mind all of the knowledge I learned from college, just to get out of my debt, I wouldn't hesitate. Because, after living life in general, reading books, articles, following intellectuals online, listening to podcasts, watching videos, working a variety of jobs, etc, etc I realize I gained nothing from college. It was a net negative because all of the positives I received were quickly erased by the crushing financial negatives.

We can't even blame the Boomers anymore, it is now Xers sending their kids to college, and they should know better. The tuition bubble keeps growing. If a kid absolutely wanted to throw his financial well-being away, potentially for life, then he'd need to break his phone with a hammer and demonstrate the ability to grind academics non-stop for a year (only computer access would have to be at the school library).

A huge problem with college is how expensive it is for Americans (I know other countries don't have this issue). If college were cheap ("affordable" is just a sales gimmick to push loans) we'd have no problem. Sadly, we live in a society that is willing to push absolute degradation on generations of a civilization to make the financial class even richer. This is especially evil when kids aren't even academically competent to excel at college.