The ironic part is this "outlier" was originally the purpose of higher education... provide a lifetime of interesting things to think about for the kids of the local nobility.
Then it morphed into a proxy for social class, where a degree meant the odds are the applicant was of a higher social class.
Then it morphed into way to make employees desperate to pay their loan, much as managers are always glad to hear an employee got a house loan or a car loan, there's someone easier to take advantage of. (edited to add, also an indication of a strong conformity streak, which in some corporate environments is highly prized, at least at the line employee level)
In the era where blue collar jobs were being eliminated but white collar jobs hadn't yet been eliminated, it became a mere daycare / votech job training facility. Liberal arts, why would I want those, I want a job!
Later it turned into a financialization scheme where the government will socialize the loan losses while the banks will privatize the loan profits, and the institutions can charge any amount of money they feel like because .gov will just print some more.
Finally it becomes an unusual noteworthy outlier to consider going to higher ed to become ... educated.
If this cycle perpetuates, as seems likely, we can make testable falsifiable predictions about the future, such as the number of students collapsing and higher ed attendance becoming a proxy for social class. To some extent we already have this, with ivy's being "real degrees" for "real jobs" and everything else not mattering much, where a liberal arts degree from Yale means you might be employed in the field not just bartending or sales like grads from lesser schools, the point is everything else will be going away, not just not mattering as much.
As typical in the fast paced world of today you'll have some people preaching the gospel of step #7 when most of the world is on step #8 and some of the leaders are already operating in step #9, #10, or even #11. This linked article is pretty much like the old timer preaching the values of the past, as if they still matter today.