Luckily I'm from a country where university is still reasonably affordable .. in fact, since I left, they've made it so fees are government-funded for the first few years. Even though I did have a student loan, it was at least interest-free.

I think university education should be seen as an extension of all earlier education. If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?

Personally, I think the time I had at university was massively useful to my educational development. Even though a lot of what I learnt during that time I consider to be "self-taught", the university environment seemed much more conducive to self learning than the working environment, where you do what your company wants for 8 hours a day then spend the rest of the day trying to defocus.

Just like primary and secondary education, it seems insane to me to just think about tertiary education as some concrete monetary investment. If you give everyone the opportunity to spend a short amount of time (like 3 or 4 years, out of a career period of 45 years) focusing on a particular field of their choosing, surely there must be a massive benefit there to society.

Edit: Also, it should probably be pointed out that a lot of research that happens at universities is used in industry, so if the university system continues to be undermined, you can expect these gains to be lost. We're probably mostly programmers, right? Try pointing to a significant feature of any programming language (old or new) that isn't taken straight from academia.