People apply and pick colleges when they're teenagers, because their school system and parents and our entire culture demands it of them. They're hardly "rational actors" and they won't fix this system alone.
An internship helped me, I was enrolled in a state school yet was pushing pencils the same as a Princeton student, this made realized the school name wasn't going to change anything in this path, just whatever technicality lets me get the degree.
For business, capital and investment banking, Ivy League puts you very far ahead, but outside of that, especially if your life involves working for someone else, the trade and the school are largely irrelevant compared to just having a degree, which also has limited relevance in many fields.
Do you have a source for this statement?
How do you feel about that?
And when will they be adult age? Even if they somehow became aware 2 years after attending that it's a waste of money, then they've already lost the ability to leverage community college for general courses with automatic acceptance into state (one of the less expensive paths) and racked up a ton of debt. Why not just finish it at that point?
We need regulation at the federal level to fix this.
Im not exactly a proponent of regulating peoples impressionability, gullibility and lack of objective reasoning
Extremely Simple math is what should inform them within four years
But since that isnt happening I could see them becoming a large enough bloc to vote for such regulation of the human condition