This seems a silly claim to me. Do you have any citations showing that folks who aren't in the set of college grads in the top 1% wind up with crappy lives? (or for its complement, that >99% of the population has a crappy life)
For all of human history, 99.9% of people have had crap jobs.
Life gets a lot better if you are OK with that, but young people are not OK with that today.
Most of human history was subsistence living, which by most anthropological estimates included a lot of free time and quite a bit of control over your day-to-day life. Assuming of course you didn't starve to death or other common ways of dying.
Even if you are referring to the period of human history with civilizations that began with the Neolithic revolution, "jobs" just didn't exist. You WERE a farmer, or a miller, or X. You didn't get "hired" or "fired". It wasn't always great, but is also wasn't anything really similar to the modern job.
This is part of the reason why people were desperate to give up subsistence living. Urbanization happened over the past couple hundred years because people saw more opportunity in cities than they could ever have with subsistence living. They would not starve to death anymore, at the very least. Their "jobs", or ways to make a living to help expand the definition for you, were very crappy, and filled with existential uncertainty, as opposed to the uncertainty of being "hired" or "fired".
Quoting from [1]
"According to the government’s own reports, the typical American defined as poor by the Census Bureau has a car, air conditioning, and cable or satellite TV. Half of the poor have computers, 43 percent have Internet, and 40 percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
"Far from being overcrowded, poor Americans have more living space in their home than the average non-poor person in Western Europe. Some 42 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes; on average, this is a well-maintained three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio."
And that's just the poor people. In this article, we're talking about people who at least have the resources to attend college.
[1] http://dailysignal.com/2015/09/16/are-there-really-40-millio...
EDIT: remove duplicate word in first sentence.
1. The fact that someone has something you don't doesn't make you worse off in an absolute sense. I have trouble making the moral leap that we need to do something that will amount to handicapping those who have earned wealth, based only on feelings of envy in the broader population.
2. In any case, it kind of proves my main point: it's not true that only 1% is successful, and the rest of us are doomed to desperate drudgery. Your explanation demonstrates that a lot of us - indeed, enough of us to set a standard of sorts - achieve success. So the point that keeps coming up in this thread about it being a winner-take-all world where any failure dooms one to purgatory is clearly false.
But you do get a big house, yeah.
Do you really think there isn't a better way to set things up? That nobody should try to fix this really shitty status quo? I seriously hope you're wrong because that is one of the most depressing sentiments about the state of humanity I've hard.