If young people learned useful skills in their elementary and primary school years, college wouldn’t be such a rat race. The only reform that can make college more affordable is to make it unnecessary for the vast majority of occupations.
College programs are what you make of them. Some people make good use of their college programs. I learned a few useful things, but mostly felt trapped.
College programs aren't being made required in the modern economy because you learn useful things in them. How many jobs in the US actually require that you know things learned in your major?
They are being made required because they are a free filter for hiring departments in companies. Between that and a combination of the facts that most hiring departments seem too understaffed or lazy to actually try and vet candidates, and that if a dud is hired you can use "But they had a college degree" as a defense, you get situations where companies are requiring you to have a college degree just to work in a call center at 12/hr
Finally people are waking up to what I have been telling friends and family. If you don't say "no" to the financial heroin dealers, you will become a slave.
The problem is that everybody keeps telling the kids that they need this piece of paper to be a success. Nobody actually cares about what the kids have learnt, the piece of paper is the important bit.
No wonder that kids are starting to call the bluff of the system and burying themselves in youtube and computer games. By all the measures of the people around them, they are either going to be failures or spend the rest of their lives working for the man, so they may as well cut to the chase and fail without even trying.
Then you get the sad statistics of the kids who decide to end it all once they realise that the myth of success is impossible and have nothing else to fall back on.
Not OP, but I think "financial heroin" in this context is any kind of loan or debt, being advertised and sold like a fancy product.
Ex: At Apple stores, the associates tell you This new iPhone X is just 33$ a month, and then I ask them "But it's 1000$ though, so I'll be paying 33$ / month for 3 years?" and they say "Yes."
Also credit cards are advertized so much but every credit card charge that you incur swiping the plastic is a loan you take from the company for the amount you are charging on the card. Lot of people don't realize this..
People are in competition between each other, and the government uses that to force/lure them into debt, to benefit "capitalist elite" (note: I'm not a socialist, far from it).
If you won't take a loan, someone will. They will have an education, you will not, so you lose.
Normally (without student loans) it would be: you can pay more, I can not, you win, I lose. Though luck. But at least both of us didn't take loans.
Any time government "subsidize something" they just raise the price, for the benefit of the provider of that something, not the consumer. If government provide loans, they additionally subsidize it from your own (instead of general taxpayer) pocket.
It's a government-run fraud. I can't believe Americans can't see through it and are not rioting. It's a systemic abuse of your own population to benefit the elites.
College programs are what you make of them. Some people make good use of their college programs. I learned a few useful things, but mostly felt trapped.