It started with with Greatest and Boomer generations beating into their kid's heads that a college education was the golden ticket of life. There was a time when a college degree...any college degree...was an enormous asset in your employment future. And that's what they taught their kids. So Gen X (and later generations) started doing whatever they could to go to college. Then the government hopped on board and tried to make it easier to pay for college by subsidizing student loans. Then colleges made getting into college easier because there was a lot of money to be made in admitting more students. The combination of the government giving away money, colleges trying to gather up as much of it as they could, and students feeling like they were spending someone else's money instead of their own led to zero consumer price pressure on higher education, and thus runaway tuition prices. Meanwhile, no one bothered to notice that a whole lot more people were getting college educations than in years past, so being educated isn't nearly the differentiator it once was. Sure, a STEM or business or law or medical degree is still a pretty solid meal-ticket in life, but degrees in social sciences and the arts just don't have tremendous value in business. So now we have a couple generations of people who thought a degree in anything was a can't-miss investment in their future, and they were willing to borrow a silly amount of money to do it. And while they were doing that, the value of many degrees was depreciating very quickly in the marketplace. And they are saddled with crippling debt and a service job that doesn't pay all that well. And now here we are in a world where some are wising up to the idea that college is too expensive and learning a skilled trade is more lucrative than getting a degree outside of STEM/business/law/medicine.