Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case for education being primarily a signal for grit and conformity: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
My pet educational reform is not 'free college for everyone', but rather that the gov't would pay out a percentage of the increase in W2 earnings before/after the education to the educational institution for a few years. The gov't would pay it, so it is not indentured servitude.
In order to get paid, the institutions would need to raise the W2 earnings of people who attended. I'd also like to see a requirement that the payouts be publicly reported, so that reports could identify which institutions were high achieving in this regard.
I personally think that reform might focus the system more on improved skills, and less on signaling and a fight for improved US news rankings.
Lumping all college degrees together confuses the issue. A computer science degree from a top-25 university gives you valuable skills. A philosophy degree from a non-top-25 university gives you no valuable skills.
Colleges like to describe all degrees as if they are similar, because most degrees give you no valuable skills, but the existence of really valuable degrees gives all degrees some signaling value.
But where do W2 earnings come from? The old boy network? Various kinds of privilege? Are you just creating an incentive to turbocharge existing patterns of discrimination? Elite colleges already do this by means of their endowments. If you’re the heir to a huge fortune, the college is happy to admit you, with the expectation that you’ll pay for a building with your name on it around the time your kids are applying.