This is Italy I'm talking about, I don't know enough about other European countries. While the average youth unemployment rate for Europe is ~19%, ours got as high as 37%. That is a lot, only better than Greece and Spain.
There are many more factors to keep into account, such as the undeniable fact that a lot of current youngsters feel entitled just because they have a degree, or flat-out refuse jobs because that's not what they studied for, as if it was beneath them. They don't seem to realize that it's no longer like it was in the past decades, when very few people could access higher education, and were of course preferred in job interviews to people who just went to high school.
On the other hand, taxation is extremely high and heavy on entrepreneurs (employees cost ~2x their salary), who then hire under shitty one-off contracts because it costs less, so the whole job market is very hard to get into and very easy to drop off of.
Another issue is that there are a bunch of useless degrees, such as this thing called "Political sciences", which makes you pretty much unemployable, and sadly a lot of people choose it, and wonder why they can't find a job.
There are also many other factors at play here. It's a shitshow, really.
Higher education does have a lot of value in terms of teaching how to solve problems and hopefully teaching you how to network, but there are reasons to either drop out or don't even get into college in the first place.