I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed both higher education and student loans - does that have any meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify, thus...)
If we stopped subsidizing the degrees less people would have them, but employers would still need the same number of employees. They would be forced to drop necessary degree requirements or go understaffed.
Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with requirements that would require minimum tenures with payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this regard. There used to at least be relocation payback requirements.)
But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment commitment.
I suspect they would like it better than paying for 4 years of education with no guarantee of employment at the end. But most likely it would be nothing of the sort. Most jobs that require degrees don't actually use any of the material in the degree (any job that doesn't care what your major was). Those jobs could just hire HS grads without any other changes.
In general they do, it might not be a guarantee, but a degree helps pass hr filters. The only way to bypass that is having years of experience in a big company or a recommendation, for junior positions a degree is very necessary.
