I don’t see how “actually, since you need college to get a good job, people go to college” deals with what I said, which is that if kids didn’t need college for the hope of a good job, then those kids uninterested in academic work would likely make different choices, and this would change everything in the equation.

If you could do what most people could do on graduation in 1955 — go get a job pretty much anywhere that paid a livable wage, the demand for college would reduce drastically because people are not choosing college because they have a burning passion to read books on philosophy or English Literature. They want the jobs that the diploma opens to them. If you had viable options for working indoors pushing paper that didn’t require college, I expect enrollment to drop like a rock.

This creates all kinds of problems. First that the cost of college is inelastic because people have to go. If they didn’t, there would be a ceiling on the cost of university education— and probably substantially lower than the current 30k a year for 5 years plus room board and meals. Second that colleges have gotten substantially less rigorous as they sop up all the C- students who want a diploma but lack either the skill or the smarts (in many cases both) to earn a degree properly.

The first part would probably fix itself if there were rules about how and when you could require a degree. Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing. If those jobs were not allowed to require college unless those specific skills were taught only in university, people who were going to college to do that stuff are going to see the price of a college degree they don’t need and say “you know what, 30k a year to study things I don’t care to learn is a terrible deal.” This clearly would lower demand for college. And with that, the college could no longer jack up prices by double digits every year.

At the same time it would solve the professors’ dilemma of having to try to teach kids clearly out of their depth and who have no interest in reading philosophy or literature. Those kids would be the ones opting out. The ones who remain are the ones who need (future doctors, lawyers, and engineers) or actually want a university education. Those kids would actually do the readings, actually study for tests, actually try to write good and interesting papers full of actual thought. Not everyone wants that.