The value of a university degree has severely deteriorated since every white collar job essentially requires having one and it will continue getting worse.
I would assume that it's worse in the US than in Europe, because in EU it seems that education is less commercialized and you can get a degree for free if you are above average.
It is interesting to look at history and see how episodes of progress often require little clusters of geniuses to make them work. In the worst case, it might be harder to set that up now. Although it is hard to tell. Maybe it'd be good to normalise just testing IQ directly if that isn't already a thing.
"Above-average" students (as measured by, for example, the SAT, ACT and/or GPA) are offered free university educations in many/most states in the US. It's just that average and even below average students can and do also gain admission, though obviously the completion rate is lower. College mostly only costs money in the US if you are not academically excellent and/or you elect to go to a private or out-of-state university without a scholarship.
If you now have to have a degree just to make it to the 40th percentile of the earning bracket that surely means it is more required than ever, and thus worth more.
So, if we consider value to be the expected life time value of obtaining a degree with respect to the person's net worth and plot it over time I would assume that this value would be decreasing.
Concrete example: a generation ago you could get your foot in the door at a bank with a high school diploma as a teller. Today? You need a 4-year degree in finance. Further, if you walked into that same bank with that same 4-year degree a generation ago, you'll probably be much further up the ladder than teller.
Your analysis misses the "what can you achieve without a degree?" part of the equation.
Some would argue that the signal was a better product than the underlying asset.
It’s not at all.