No, they do not. Universities offer undergraduate education to school leavers. Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers. Students pursue degrees with poor career options despite advice and the offerings in the humanities are shrinking.
A feature you overlooked is how bad the graduate employment market is for even the degrees most favoured by employers.
If there are any similar institutions in the UK, they are the wealthiest Oxbridge colleges. The students at these places do not so much think their degrees are overpriced.
That joke was far more true than people think -- the Yale model is now common in institutional investment.
Few oxbridge colleges are anywhere near as wealthy in comparison, and a lot have gigantic white elephants with their grade I listed buildings that are falling apart.
Long before Yale, King's College Cambridge pioneered sophisticated investment management: Keynes turned around the college's assets on the 1930s during the Great Depression to become level with the traditionally wealthiest Cambridge college, Trinity, which had long had vast property assets.
> No they do not.
Then why are student loans (in the US) the only loans not dischargable in bankruptcy? If I live like an irresponsable asshole, run up credit card debt right and left, buy a car and who knows what else I can't afford and it finally catches up to me, I can just throw up my hands and say "Ok, you've got me. Bankruptcy." They'll take my fancy stuff, my credit takes a hit, and I can move on with my life with a clean slate.
On the other hand, if I try to improve myself and my community by getting educated to get a good job, go into debt doing so, and then can't repay the debt because the good jobs the university promised aren't actually there, I can NEVER GET RID OF THAT DEBT. It will literally follow me until the day I die. Why? Because Universities are mostly a scam, and the people running them know it. If they had any faith in the education they were providing, they would put their money where their mouth was and let people discharge the loans if needed. Almost everything in the modern era has a "Satisfaction or your money back" guarantee, except education. The reason is that they have no faith in the product they're selling.
>Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers.
On the contrary, there was a whole industry, the for profit college industry, that existed solely by lying about the viability of the education they provided. Thankfully those have largely collapsed now, but the ordinary college world is hardly any better. As just one example, nearly all of them trumpet the well-worn graphs showing the connection between college education and increasing income, despite those graphs being blatant lies (income goes up among college graduates because most people from rich families go to college, not because college makes you more employable).
There was a time, post WWII, that college was a no-brainer. That time is long past. And it's amazing how much of the population is still hypnotized into believing, and ardently defending, the idea that college is still a good idea for anyone who isn't already rich. Young people's futures are being destroyed. The future of many nations is being destroyed. Huge amounts of public funds are being wasted. And yet people still keep defending the scam.
If you came from a well-off family, went to college, and got a great job related to your degree, great. Understand that most college attendees are not you. Most are middle-class or lower, desperately trying to find some way to avoid working in the service industry for the rest of their lives. And most will fail, with a debt burden that is modest to you, but devastating to them.
In the US, the loans are overwhelmingly made through the Federal system, not by universities.