Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.
People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
Farming on the other hand, especially modern farming, must take a lot longer to learn. There is a lot more to learn about your equipment alone, nevermind your crops, fertilizers, rotating fields, weather patterns, etc.
Do you still miss the time where we were all farmers ?
I agree that we're trending up which should feel AMAZING, but we're human so people's individual stories are what make us feel the most ;)
Also at my high school the metric for our school's success was 99%+ of the graduating class going to college, and it felt like pure vanity because it meant more likely than not tons of people going into debt and getting nothing out of it for the sake of "education"
I feel the problem is not that college is useless even if massively used, but maybe the american pricing of education is not aligned with expected returns, as you pointed out. It's far from mandatory in the countries I know to take a big loan for studies. Usually it's even more everyone else struggling to pay taxes for you to go.
This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”