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...