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Part of the problem might stem from how student loans are treated differently than other types of debt, without properly accounting for risk. It makes me wonder if there’s data on how many graduates from a given degree program actually enter a field related to their studies. With that kind of information, it might be possible to better assess the risk associated with student loans. Loans are just one part of the equation, but they’re a critical one.
Edit: In case it was not clear, I am arguing that the formula here is entities who are incentivized by churning students through programs and loans which are not being properly underwritten. Student loans should not be a special class of debt. We have gone over the line of improving upward mobility and created an industry that produces useless degrees with high debt loads. If student loan could be discharged easily via bankruptcy and the underwriting process could potentially reject applications based on risk, it might be easier to help funnel people through. Instead we allow young people to take on $30-50k for a masters degree that has little to no chance of being useful.
Another downside is the loan officers in the colleges are not showing these students the downsides to these loans. They are borderline predatory and selling to financially inexperienced people. When I did this in the mid 90s they are super happy to give me a loan that was 0% until I got out then went straight to 8.5%. I at the time had enough math to figure out 8.5% was a bad deal for the amount of income I was about to earn.
Just because some employers require a degree(or equivalent experience) for some jobs, it does not guarantee that you will get that job.
An example would be Electrical Engineering, with this degree you could do work in a power plant or design cheap kids toys(or anything in between). What you want to do is up to you and you need to chart your own course.
If you want a program that trains you and then gives you a job that you have received training for, the military is famous for that. However, don't expect that the job training that you received will necessarily translate into jobs in the civilian world here either.
I don't disagree that its up to the individual to write their future but in the case of college programs I think we as a society oversell their value. College programs are just churning students out regardless of viability and part of that is being fueled by how educational loans are treated differently than most other forms of debt. So you have a young individual who might not know anything about the world, a college system that is just trying to churn degrees out, society who tells people that college degrees are important and loans which are not properly underwriting the loans. Its a recipe for disaster in my opinion and I believe the way loans work are a large part of it. Underwrite as many people as possible for whatever degree they want.
I agree that we oversell the value of a collage degree. To me it feels like that some point in the 80's or 90's that everyone in the US decided that collage was "this one simple trick to get rich" that they had to have their children try out. I would note that this occurred at the same time that we decided that we needed to move to a service economy rather than a manufacturing economy.
I think trying to tie "the usefulness" to a loan that is being used to impart general knowledge on the basis of job prospects is going to be very hard.
For example, in the early 90's a degree in Network Engineering would be rated a a high risk as there would not be many jobs available for those with that skill set. Fast forward 10 years and the internet is the hottest thing on the market.
There are examples in the opposite direction as well, where there are fields that were booming and suddenly went bust. Mining Engineer for example when looking at coal mines.
You seem to be looking at things from a top down command point of view where our society is operating as more of a bottom push driven system.