Because the math you were forced to do was caused by very specific policy decisions at the government level that radically changed how schools were publicly funded directly(lower costs to all students) to one where it is "public funding" but private risk by student loans that drove up perverse incentives to bloat school bureaucracy and lower the educational standards and raise costs. https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

While you were in a position to make a certain career decision due to the field you wanted to go into (tech), other field require schooling. For example medicine doesn't have on the job training that allows one to be a nurse, radiology tech, respiratory tech, dr, surgeon and so forth. Do you want there to be even less of those people?

What about accountants? What about engineers? Should they just "teach themselves". The idea was that all these roles are publicly beneficial and we used to recognize that.

The "Policy" of student loans was a government decision and directly created this problem and it is what needs to change to solve it.