See: unemployment rate among Americans with a four year degree, or any college experience at all for that matter. The unemployment rate is hyper low.

That unemployment rate is half that of the European Union, as is the unemployment rate across the board in the US.

More people in the US are moving up from middle skill jobs to higher skill, better paying jobs, than are falling from middle skill to lower skill jobs:

http://i.imgur.com/WLJ73C7.png

If you want to talk about crushing debt, see: Canada, Australia, UK, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands - all of which have worse household debt to income levels than the US (including the student debt in the equation). Canada's household debt to income ratio, as one example, is now nearly twice that of the US. Denmark's is three times that of the US; Norway's is over twice that of the US.

The US also has a lower share of adults still living with their parents compared to most of Europe. In some cases, dramatically lower (Portugal is 44% vs 14% for the US).

The US has one of the highest median incomes, and median disposable incomes. Higher than: Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, etc.

The US has a higher median net household wealth level than Germany or Sweden.

The US median student debt among people with any student debt, is $13,000. Household debt to income levels have been falling for six straight years, and are back to normalized levels last seen during the boom days of the 1990s.

What you're claiming, doesn't hold up under any scrutiny.

College is expensive, and it's bad, but private schools are an order of magnitude more expensive; the popular narrative typically ignores public schools which cost roughly 50-80K for an undergraduate degree, depending on location. Private schools run around 200K+ at full cost, I believe.

I personally sucked up a fairly large of debt because I made several poor choices. This is not the case, in general, for my peers, who chose better.