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Because colleges today are putting out a product that nobody wants. They are producing buggy whips.

I wrote this piece in 2020 from the perspective of college graduates not being able to pay off their expensive university degrees.

I believe the problem is that universities are putting out a product that there is no demand for.
I believe it's a three-fold issue.
The job market isn't paying the salaries.
The students aren't pursuing the marketable degrees.
The universities are cranking out graduates without regard to whether the job market is there for the graduates. In other words, they are graduating buggy whips.
The causes for #1 are two-fold:
The jobs are being off-shored to lower-cost geographies.
The cheaper workers are being imported via H-1B visas and are displacing our graduates.
The causes for #2 are two-fold:
The students are choosing social-justice degrees with no anchoring in reality.
The K-12 schools are socially promoting students who either aren't ready for college or are better suited to trade studies.
The causes for #3 are two-fold:
The students have been socially indoctrinated to believe the only way to succeed is with a college degree, so everyone must now go to college.
The change to government-sponsored student loans has made it easy for universities to pad their enrollments in order to get the funding to sustain their tenures and research programs.
I believe that if there is a market balance between supply and demand then the price paid will equal the cost plus profit. If the universities were balancing the supply of graduates with the demand for graduates, this would mean that the graduates were being paid a salary that allowed them to pay off their loans plus their living expenses.
The fact is that the university degree market is completely unbalanced and out of whack. Young students may be making good decisions to pursue a degree, but many are too uninformed at that age to understand that the universities are glutting the market right now. The universities have built up a capital investment in professors and manufactured an inventory of graduates that can't be sold.
The university result will eventually be the same as a business selling unwanted products: their inventory of unsold graduates will lose their value (in terms of alumni donations, university brand reputation, etc.), and the university might eventually go out of business if they can't get new student enrollments because the word is out that their graduates are unemployable.
Is all of this the fault of the student loan scam? Is it the result of students making bad career decisions? Is it the fault of businesses that are looking for cheaper workers or exporting jobs? Is it the fault of universities hungry for students flush with loan cash that they keep taking them in regardless of the ability of the job market to absorb the graduates?

-PJ

Well written comments on the issue.

As a Mgr. (with an MBA) at a major defense contractor, I experienced applicants sent to me by jerks in HR to interview. The worst were MBAs from Stanford and Harvard.

The job openings didn’t require an MBA. Their schools had oversold the salaries they could demand and get with those degrees. Their asking salaries were typically 25-50% higher than our Mgrs’ and Director’s. Plus, they had no experience or skills specified for the open jobs.

HR personnel must get points for arranging interviews and wasting the time if interviewers.