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.

You're arguing that the problem is on the jobs side, and if everyone just got paid more there would be no problems. You have no arguments whatsoever as to why the price of college exploded in the past 20 years. On the other hand, I've now given you two heavily-documented responses explaining EXACTLY why the price of college has exploded over the past 20 years and you're resolutely at if we paid people more college would be cheaper.

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.

Okay, so what changed since 1955 other than college loans becoming available to all and dissolving of college debt becoming available to none? Elastic inelastic blah blah blah you wanna give causality a try?

Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing.

Fucking hell, buddy, they absolutely do. Here's an undergrad in spreadsheets tearing apart the biggest conservative political theory of 2010:

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's easy. The problem isn't the education, the problem is the cost of education and the cost of education is related to policy.