My advice is to take a gap year before college. If you can become gainfully employed during that gap year, why bother?
I prefer to live in a society where, when in doubt, people are usually more educated than they actually need to be. This is far better than the reverse.
The bad thing is the debt, not the college.
To add to this: the bad thing is that college is being peddled as necessary for career placement/advancement, when it's just another big business looking to profit off of young people who don't know what to do with their life.
College level education is great. The more educated and well-rounded a society is the more it will benefit from each other. The fundamental problem is exploitation for profit (much like our health care/insurance industry here in the US).
The US has among the highest levels of university education attainment on the planet. [1][2] That's one part of the cost inflation problem.
You can in fact still receive a tremendous education in the US without ending up with large student loans.
The median cost of in-state tuition + fees to public universities in the US is close to $8,000 per year (the average is $9,650). The US has a lot of great public universities.
You can solidly get a four year degree, work occasionally on the side, and exit college with between $0 and ~$16,000 in student loans. $100,000 in student loan debt is not a requirement to getting a good engineering job making $60,000+ per year in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
[2] http://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/Fig10_Compara...
I think maybe the better advice might be to go to community college or a trade school. That'll give people the same type of structure they might need to learn without the price tag, and also still allow them to develop a lot of core social skills required for adulting.
A week after I graduated high school, I moved out of my parents house to another state to attend a vo-tech school for a 1 year associates. Six months prior to graduation from that school, I had started my first job in software engineering. I graduated, and continued to be gainfully employed.
Today I wish I had gone to college to obtain a degree in CompSci. I'm not certain, but I am pretty sure I could have obtained an MS, if not gone further. I base this on my fairly recent experiences with my understanding and abilities vis-a-vis with MOOC courses for ML/AI. They have shown me that I have an aptitude for understanding this more advanced stuff - and likely always have.
Had I gone to school then, things would likely be better today. I'd probably be earning more, or have even gone down the startup route (I recall asking the owner of the company I first started at how he started the company - so there was interest there, and still is today to an extent - though I understand more about myself as an adult to know that I would probably be a poor business owner). More than anything, though, I would have a much better understanding of the deep and theoretical underpinnings of computer science, plus the knowledge of the math behind it all.
Today, with the MOOCs and other methods I am trying to make up for this lost time. I don't believe that it will change my salary or life; I don't think I will be likely to publish any papers on arXiv advancing the state of the art or anything, but I do intend to make some changes. If I'm very lucky, I might even manage a BS.
I don't think the years of work missed in my career nor the debt would have been that large of a burden in the grand scheme of things (granted, back then it was much cheaper to go to college than it is today); for me, the tradeoff for the knowledge would have been worth it.
My problem then and today is that I am lazy by nature (another reason I wouldn't be a good business owner); I did not want to spend more time at a school doing a ton of homework and such. That attitude has likely cost me a lot in missed and lost opportunities.
What doesn't make sense to me in light of that, though, is that I love to learn and I seek out opportunities and means to do so. I guess what I don't like is rote busywork; let me learn something, give me some examples, let me try my own hand at it, and once I am comfortable with the knowledge, let me move on.
High school doesn't do that, and I didn't realize I was like that until much later, and nobody told me that college doesn't work like high school. I know these things now, which helps me to tailor my self-studies better. But while I might have not listened back then, I also kind of wish somebody had told me and guided me better.
/working with what I have, and doing well at it, though...