If that's your perspective, I can understand why it would seem ridiculous. But consider other perspectives. Think of all the people who weren't the first in their family to go to college.
Imagine that you're 18, and everyone you know tells you that you need to go to school to get a good job. People are competing to get into better schools, and you get admitted to a relatively nice private college with a beautiful campus. Your parents went to a similar college, graduated, got jobs, started a family, and are encouraging you to do the same thing.
Except now, college is something like 5x as expensive as it was for your parents, teachers, and advisors, adjusted for inflation. Your job prospects after college are worse, too. Maybe you manage to pull in $15/hr and you think it's pretty good, but meanwhile rent is 50% higher than it was for your parents and teachers.
You feel like you were lied to, betrayed, and you feel trapped. As a society, we created this problem. I'm not trying to take away agency from the people who chose to take out loans and study whatever they felt like, but we did send an army of teachers and academic advisers after our children telling them that college is what you need, and loans are how you pay for it.
The idea of a "non-economically practical degree" is a bit of a red herring, here. It doesn't matter as much which degree you get as an undergraduate. Sure, there are a few high-paying degrees like geology but in many fields you can get work with a range of degrees. Based on what I was majoring in, people would ask me if I was going to go into teaching, as if that were the only option for someone in my field. Yet here I am, working in industry.