This is the impact of public brainwashing. People know college is expensive. Many don’t know how a college education will help them personally. And yet, they’ve been told they must have a college degree in order to succeed.
Many companies started to just generically require them for many jobs - no matter what the field of study. Just a “bachelor’s degree.” This has more people going to college than really need to, which has degraded both the quality of a college degree (look at the nonsense they are teaching these days) and the former advantage of having one.