> So my question is: why do people subject themselves to this?People, as a rule, do not make all of their choices from first principles. When you wake up in the morning hungry, you don't wander out to the back yard and begin conducting methodical experiments to determine which plants growing there are safely edible.
We rely on culture to give us default answers to most of life's questions. If not answers, culture will at least winnow down our choices to a few and nudge towards the safest options. We lean on this so heavily that we can't even perceive ourselves doing it. It's as if the options not handed to us by our culture don't even exist.
We pick up culture from our parents and peer group. It changes all the time, but relatively slowly. If you're roughly the age of a Gen-xer, then you're the offspring of Boomers. That generation grew up in a world of post-WWII economic prosperity surrounded by colleges flush with cash from the GI Bill.
Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. They experienced a reality where they could easily afford to go to college for whatever struck their fancy. When they got out, well-paid jobs were ripe for the picking regardless of education.
They passed all of that onto their children as a cultural assumption that college is always good, you should follow your passions, and that it will work out economically. Then corporations destroyed the labor movement, economic inequality skyrocketed, and government funding of education withered and died. Unfortunately, our prevailing culture was slow to get that memo.
TL;DR: We tacitly assume it's safe to do what worked for our parents even when we don't live in the same world they did.