"... I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt."

This is not said often enough and it is a shame.

Universities are not intended to be vocational schools. They're research institutions where the value they generate is the knowledge they discover. The knowledge discovered is often frivilous and arcane with no real use outside of a very specialized subsection of a field of study. However, there's also the knowledge which is 'useless' at the time of its discovery but changes the world later on as its studied further and applications are discovered.

E.g. https://math.berkeley.edu/~gmelvin/math54f12/math110su12_gra...

I don't think there's much more to add than Turchin's ideas of "overproduction of the elites" and it rubs me the wrong way when I hear intelligent people gripe about how university credentials and research have marginal vocational utility. The problem's with a culture that celebrates credentialism and gets people to take on crippling levels of debt to avoid an impovershed future, not scholarship.