I’d say I’m pretty progressive on most issues, and obviously I have sympathy for my friends that ended up this way, but I have to agree with you that one way we could end up with fewer people limping along is to just keep them from shooting themselves in the foot.
But there is! Few parents say "I hope Jimmy grows up to become a great carpenter." White collar professionalism is what we groom our kids for.
People say this, but it is so often said by people not in these industries. My brother in law is an electrician and he gets paid badly, works rough hours, and is provided fairly limited safety by his employer. This is obviously a data point of one, but the fact that he feels incapable of finding a better job in his city indicates to me that this is the norm.
Coincidentally, I also have a brother in law who is an electrician, and he is not doing well. But then again he's a self proclaimed communist and has zero work ethic.
I chose not to pursue higher education personally (at the time for the wrong reasons), and one thing I remember very distinctly was just how much it was promoted as “the path forward”. A counselor was visibly shocked when I as a sophomore, hadn’t been grooming myself to appeal to colleges and universities in a few years.
But I also think the student debt problem is more nuanced than just "terrible majors". Tuition has increased faster than just about anything (sans healthcare, I believe) while wages were mostly stagnant. Previous generations could largely get through college debt-free working part-time at minimum wage, regardless of major. So I don't think the student debt crisis can be chalked up to "terrible major" selection. The level of student debt is, in part, driven by the way universities spend money to attract "customers" err...I mean students. I think we need to find a way to mitigate colleges being run like businesses in that respect.
Just the nature of this thread (cost, ROI, supply & demand) shows how much of college is thought of in a business mindset which is a departure from how it used to be viewed.
I would also argue that while the economy may not need humanities majors, society probably does. E.g., An engineer can tell you how to do something (e.g., develop facial recognition for public cameras or develop attention maximizing social media algorithms) but an engineer with a grounded understanding of philosophy can help determine if that's the right thing to deploy as policy and whether they, at the individual level, wants to support that with their career choice.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but you often hear a chortled reply about "underwater basket weaving majors" in these discussions being blamed. Certainly, people are accountable for their college choices, but the whole discussion is based on the idea that college is a business transaction that requires some ROI and ignores the systemic effects that have driven costs to a ridiculous level.
Sure some will hang out all day. But some could be the ones that think of the next jump in technology. Some could be amazing artists.
We need to stop tying self and societal worth to dollars earned per hour.
The people in this world who do the least take the most. It needs to stop.
Those of us that scored in the 95th percentile and above were singled out by the recruiters and all 40 of us got a 15 minute sales pitch to join the military.
They never got any engineers, programmers, doctors, construction managers, tile setters, welders, insurance adjusters, lawyers, police officers, nurses, radiologists, tugboat captains, pipefitters, machinists, draftsmen, etc...