I think it all depends on whether you expect the deception to involve some degree of malice. While there are certainly malicious individual actors and institutions that we can point to and blame, this is on a systematic level in which the system itself is the scam, and with little distinction between the deceivers and the deceived; perpetuated by belief, and strengthened by competition and demand. It favors only the very few who either lucked out, e.g. by choosing a profitable degree, or those who figured out how to game the system, the opportunists; neither of whom designed the scam nor run it. In fact, it was never designed to be a scam. It's simply an aged system that now must be run as one in order to stay relevant and survive.

The deception is in the belief itself, and the government has a tremendous power to shatter it, yet they choose not to.